Customer Satisfaction through Technological Integration: Opportunities and Challenges

Introduction

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that refers to the practices, strategies and technologies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle, with the goal of improving business relationships with customers, assisting in customer retention, and driving sales growth. With the increasing challenges from competitors, customer relationship has become an essential asset for businesses to pursue prosperity. CRM has been widely implemented in many farsighted companies’ business strategies to deliver a more effective and efficient way of marketing, selling, and servicing customers. CRM covers the three stages as shown in Figure 1 which are: 1) Marketing stage, which focus on attracting customers by setting up promotions and advertisement, 2) Selling and Delivering stage, which conducts business activities to sell products or deliver services to customers, and 3) Customer Servicing stage which provide the after-sales services to retain customers and build customer loyalty. In order to effectively and efficiently build customer loyalty and retain customers, customer satisfaction is needed to be carefully and correctly addressed in the stage 3 of the CRM.

Figure 1.

Three stages of customer relationship management

Organizations are setting themselves strategies to ensure customer retention, and changing their employees to be more customer-focused and service-oriented (Mohsan et al., 2011). In 2014, the Gartner Group found that top marketers were focused on delivering and investing in a streamlined customer experience. The research found that digital marketers were spending almost as much to retain customers (45%) as they do to gain new ones (55%) (Ross, 2014a). In 2015, companies will recognize that a better customer experience will improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty and improve retention. They will also see their customer acquisition costs increase and look to invest more in customer retention strategies. Companies will want technologies or tools that integrate easily with their existing marketing technology and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. The top drivers for spending on new technologies are all customer-related: (i) Improving customer service / customer satisfaction (62%); (ii) Increasing customer retention (59%); and (iii) Deliver better customer experience (55%). (MarketingCharts, 2014)

The advancements of technology and the internet have changed the ways business activities operate. Social media has become a main communication network in the daily lives of people around the world, with over a billion users of social media network worldwide. The advent of social media has caused organizations to engage customers directly through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. To encourage customer interactions on social media, businesses hope to monitor social conversations, from specific mentions of a brand to the frequency of keywords used, to determine their target audience and which platforms they use. Companies are interested in capturing sentiments such as a customer's likelihood of recommending their products and the customer's overall satisfaction in order to develop marketing and service strategies. Companies aim to integrate the data from social media with other customer data obtained from sales or marketing in order to get a single view of the customer. The proliferation of mobile devices and the advent of smartphones have caused CRM providers to consider upgrading their systems to include new features that cater to customers who use these technologies. In particular, mobile devices have been shown to be very personal devices which may provide firms with opportunities to build and maintain one-to-one relationships with their customers; combined with a large reach, low cost, rapid feedback, and constant accessibility and localization possibilities.