Customer relationship management or CRM can be defined as “an approach to manage a company's interaction with current and potential customers. It uses data analysis about customers' history with a company to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth” (“Customer Relationship Management”, 2018).
Therefore, it is extremely important that a company or organization follows good CRM practices to ensure that their organization’s interaction with current and potential customers is effective and builds or improves the customer’s relationship and overall experience with the organization.
Besides decent social media tactics, the Children’s Hunger Alliance does not do a very good job at putting CRM into practice. A potential volunteer or donor can sign up to receive an e-newsletter, but a thank you or welcome email is not sent. In addition, it is hard to find the information stating when the first e-newsletter will arrive in one’s inbox. There is no direct contact person or email address and the list of contacts that is provided on the “Contact Us” page, only lists the email addresses of directors and coordinators. None of which seem to be associated with customer relations or customer service.
Moreover, potential volunteers can sign up to be a volunteer and potential donor are presented with multiple ways to make a donation (i.e. text message, on a secure payment form, etc.). But other than those forms after a call to action message, there is no seen effort to build a customer service-based relationship. Therefore, the Children’s Hunger Alliance might find it hard to build customer loyalty which in turn, could turn into the organization finding it hard to gain more volunteers. If there is no emotional connection between an organization and a customer, the customer will find another organization to be loyal to that has a better CRM process.
A few suggestions for the Children’s Hunger Alliance to improve their CRM is to understand the goal that CRM accomplishes. One of the goals is learning. In a 2017 article from Forbes regarding the importance of CRM, the author of the article explains that, “CRM helps businesses learn about their customers, including who they are and why they purchase your products, as well as trends in customers' purchasing histories. This allows businesses to better anticipate their customers' needs and, as a result, fulfill them. Effectively using customer relationship management can also provide a strategic advantage. Well organized customer data helps companies select the correct recipients for promotions and new products (Kulpa, 2017)”.
After the Children’s Hunger Alliance learns about their audience and gains understand on how to effectively create and maintain a relationship with them, they will be able to focus their efforts on perfecting operational CRM. Operational CRM is defined as “usually having to do with one of the three types of operations: marketing, sales and service.an important tool for lead generation because it frequently deals with past customer data such as previous marketing campaigns, purchases and service satisfaction (Kulpa, 2017)”. Moreover, after the organization learns about their customers, they will be able to understand how to maintain their current audience, they will understand how to gain and attract a potential audience.
References
“Customer Relationship Management.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 26 July 2018, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_management.
Kulpa, Jason. “Why Is Customer Relationship Management So Important?” Forbes,
Forbes Magazine, 24 Oct. 2017,
www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/10/24/why-is-customer-relationship-management-so-important/.
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