What is Collaborative CRM? How does it help to build Collaborative Strategy?

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By TechOneStop
Collaborative CRM and Collaborative Strategy

What is collaborative CRMIn our last couple of articles, we have discussed about Operational CRM and Analytical CRM. Here we will discuss about 3rd type of CRM applications – Collaborative CRM and its importance to build a collaborative strategy.First let us see what do we mean by collaborative strategy and why it is important for an organization.

What is collaborative strategy?

Collaborative Strategy is a method where a company gives a common platform to build synergy among all stakeholders for business process improvement, product innovation and pricing, customer or employee retention.

Steps to build a successful collaborative strategy:

1) Understand the business goal:

An enterprise may have different collaborative strategy for different business needs. For example: Strategy for business process improvement may differ from employee retention strategy. So business must define their goal that they want to achive using collaborative strategy.

2) Identify stakeholders:

It is another important task for an enterprise to determine who can access business information. Data visibility rules must be set to protect data from being stolen or leaked.

3) Choose technology based on business needs:

There are lots of fancy applications available in the market but all of them may not have same capabilities to meet your requirements. Beside business requirement, you must consider other factors also like software cost and scalability, development duration, maintenance effort. This is the place where collaborative CRM comes into Collaborative Strategy.

4) Measure the effectiveness of the strategy:

Business must have some KPIs which will tell how effective the strategy was, can you continue with the same strategy or it needs any modification.

We will discuss more about Collaborative Strategy in another article, let us talk about Collaborative CRM now.

What is Collaborative CRM?

Collaborative CRM is a method in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where various departments (like Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance) within an organization share customer information to maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. The purpose of collaboration is to enhance the quality of service and customer satisfaction.

Example: Feedback from a customer, gathered by technical support team could help marketing team to suggest more suitable products or services to the customer.

Interaction Management and Channel Management are two major parts in Collaborative CRM.

Interaction Management:

Collaborative CRM - Interaction ManagementThis process is responsible to manage all interactions between the organization and its customers. Some customers may prefer paper less communication like email or phone call or social media, some may prefer face-to-face interaction or physical letter. Whatever the communication channel is, it is important for an organization to reach customers via their preferred channels only. Interaction management system handles all these communications across various channels.

Channel Management:

It helps to reach customers more efficiently and effectively using their preferred interaction channels. It improves the channel interaction to maximize customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Advantages of Collaborative CRM:

– Improves customer interactions across channels
– Reduces service cost by using web or online collaborations
– Synchronizes customer data with call centre to allow multi channel interactions

Ultimate goal of Collaborative CRM is to bring customers, business processes and organization units together to achieve maximum customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Do you have any question? Please feel free to comment below.

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YouTube Linked Comment – why I can’t reply?

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By TechOneStop
youtube linked comment

Have you seen ‘LINKED COMMENT‘ in YouTube? Few days back, one of our readers asked us a question – ‘What is YouTube Linked Comment? Why can’t I reply on all linked comments?‘

youtube linked comment

Well, before discussing the solution, let me give you brief background about our reader’s situation. Our reader has a popular YouTube channel with 50+ videos. He has noticed that few comments on his YouTube videos are marked as ‘LINKED COMMENT’. Also few of such comments have ‘Reply’ option active and for others there is no ‘Reply’ button. So he wanted to know what is YouTube Linked Comment and why there is such behaviour difference between two linked comments.

So what is YouTube Linked Comment?

Google marks a comment as ‘LINKED COMMENT’ if it is coming from Google+. Suppose you have shared a video on Google+ and your viewer has commented on that video from his Google+ page. You can see that comment on your YouTube video but marked as ‘LINKED COMMENT’.

But why ‘Reply’ option is not available for all linked comments?

This is because your viewer has restricted replies on Google+ page settings. As the comment came from Google+ page and viewer has restricted replies, there is nothing you can do here to make the ‘Reply‘ option available.linked comment

To verify further, you can go to your viewer’s Google+ page and locate your video where he has commented. You should not see ‘Add a comment‘ box.

Is there any workaround to get back ‘Reply’ button?

There are couple of workarounds that you could try to get the ‘Reply’ option.

– You could ask your viewer to add you in his Google+ circle. If your viewer has given reply permission to his circle, you will get the ‘Reply’ button back.

– If the first workaround does not work for you, copy the comment and post it as a new comment. This will make ‘Reply’ option active.

Was it enough to clear your doubt? If you have any question about YouTube Linked Comment, Please feel free to comment below.

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Also read: Policy Breach Notice: We are no longer detecting PII being passed to Google from the account

What is Analytical CRM

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By TechOneStop
What is Analytical CRM

Analytical CRMWe know that there are three types of CRM applications – Operational CRM, Analytical CRM and Collaborative CRM. In our previous post we have discussed about Operational CRM. Here we will talk about what is Analytical CRM, its key features and benefits.

Let’s start our discussion with an example. Imagine a scenario where a company knows what customers want to buy even before launching the product. Though this happens only in ideal scenario but almost similar kind of result can be achieved using Analytical CRM.

So what is Analytical CRM?

It is a systematic approach to analyze customer data and interactions to improve various business processes in Sales, Marketing and Service. The main purpose of Analytical CRM is to gather customer information from various channels and gain knowledge about customers’ behaviors and buying pattern as much as possible. It helps an organization to develop new marketing strategy, campaign management, customer acquisition and retention.

Difference between Operational CRM and Analytical CRM:

Operational CRM deals with automation of Sales, Marketing and Difference between Operational CRM and Analytical CRMService processes that involve direct interaction of customers’ requirements. Whereas Analytical CRM handles those operations that do not have direct dealing with customers. It analyzes customer data to enhance decision making capability of an organization.

Key features of Analytical CRM:

  1. Gathers all relevant information about customers from various channels/sources and builds a knowledge base for an organization
  2. Analyzes customer data based on rules and methods set by business and prepares report to improve customer relationship and interaction
  3. Helps business to segment customers and run more customer centric marketing campaign to increase sales
  4. Decides what if scenarios – probability of a customer that purchases one product could buy another product
  5. Monitors events like customer may purchase gifts on his marriage anniversary
  6. Helps business to predict the probability of customer defection and take necessary steps
  7. Assists top management to do better financial forecasting and planning

Benefits of using Analytical CRM:

  1. Higher lead conversation rate
  2. Better customer experience by addressing their needs more effectively and efficiently
  3. Better market analysis before running a campaign
  4. Increase customer loyalty and satisfaction
  5. More accurate financial forecasting and planning

Analytical CRM analyzes data coming from every aspect of business and generates reports.

  1. Customer Analysis Report:

    This is the basic report based on analysis of customer knowledge base. This gives 360 degree view of a customer that helps a company to gain further insights about customer’s needs and preferences.

  2. Sales Analysis Report:

    This type of reports shows the organization’s sales trend for a specified period – monthly, quarterly, yearly or any time frame that is significant for business. It provides support to streamline all sales opportunities by improving sales cycle. This helps managers to identify market opportunity, predict sales volumes and profit by analyzing historical sales data.

  3. Marketing Analysis Report:

    This kind of reports helps to discover new marketing opportunities and improve marketing performance by maximizing Return On Investment (ROI).  It decides marketing performance based on various parameters like region, channels, political influence. It also focuses on campaign planning and execution, product analysis.

  4. Service Analysis Report:

    Service Analytics is a major area in Analytical CRM. It provides the insight about customer satisfaction, quality of service and areas of improvement in service. It finds out opportunities to cross sell or up sell products. It helps to track employee performance and productivity, tells management to conduct required training for employees.

  5. Channel Analysis Report:

    Channel Analysis report helps business to understand customers’ behavior across channels like email, phone call, social media or face to face interaction. This kind of knowledge can be used to interact with customers more effectively and efficiently.

For an organization, collection of customer data and its analysis is a continuous and iterative process. Decisions based on customer data and feedback become better and more accurate over the time.
Analytical CRM uses various data mining techniques like predictive modelling, supervised modelling. We will discuss about data mining in CRM in another article.

Do you have any question? Please feel free to comment below.

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