The author of this article introduces and analyzes what is a customer management system, the necessity of a customer management system, core business processes, conceptual model design, and application architecture design.
1. What is a customer management system?
The main goal of a customer management system, also known as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), is to establish, develop, and maintain good customer relationships.
The CRM system focuses on the management of the whole life cycle of customers, attracts and retains customers, and achieves the purpose of shortening the sales cycle, reducing sales costs, and increasing sales revenue, so as to improve the profitability and competitiveness of enterprises.
The CRM system takes customer data as the core, records the company's various interactions with customers in the process of marketing and sales, as well as the status of various activities, and provides help for subsequent analysis and decision-making.
2. Why do retailers need a customer management system?
Enhance customer loyalty: CRM systems allow businesses to accurately identify target customer groups, gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, and provide quality services, including pre-sale, in-sale, and post-sale support. For example, if a shopper can recommend items you're interested in based on your shopping history and browsing habits, this personalized service will make you feel like the merchant is caring and encourage you to buy again.
Improve sales efficiency: By optimizing sales process management and tracking the information of potential customers, the CRM system helps to improve the sales team's work efficiency and overall sales. For example, an online salesperson can use a CRM system to obtain the customer's basic information and purchase history before serving the customer. This information can help salespeople better understand the needs of customers, which can lead to improved sales effectiveness.
Improve marketing effectiveness: CRM systems enable companies to accurately grasp customer needs and implement precise marketing strategies, thereby improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. For example, when you receive a text message about a product or service you are interested in, you are likely to click on it to view details, which is the effect of precision marketing that CRM systems help businesses achieve.
Promote internal collaboration: CRM systems can facilitate collaboration within a business, especially between sales, marketing, and customer service departments. For example, customer service personnel want to know the customer's after-sales service, and can query relevant information through the CRM system, so as to solve customer problems more effectively.
3. Core business processes
In order to attract and retain customers and improve the company's performance, the business process of the CRM system covers the management of the whole life cycle of customers, including the following links:
Data precipitation: This is the foundation of the customer management system, which is responsible for collecting and storing all customer data, including customer basic information, purchase history, web browsing behavior, and feedback. This information plays a vital role in analyzing customers, understanding their needs, and improving products and services, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.
Customer tags: By analyzing data such as customers' shopping habits, types of goods purchased, and feedback on goods or services, customers are categorized and labeled, and these labels can allow businesses to better understand customers and provide more appropriate products and services.
Crowd tagging: Identify people with similar traits or behaviors based on customer data and tags. These groups can be used for subsequent marketing activities, such as promotions, targeted advertising, personalized recommendations, etc. In addition, it can also help enterprises better understand market trends and improve products and services.
Scenario marketing: Provide personalized marketing solutions according to the behavior patterns and needs of customers in different scenarios. For example, for customers who frequently buy baby products, you can provide them with coupons for related products. This can improve the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and increase customers' purchase intentions.
Reach conversion: Push various marketing campaigns and specific services to potential customers through multiple reach channels, such as SMS, outbound calls, subscription messages, etc., to drive transaction conversions. This process requires constant experimentation and optimization to find the most effective conversion strategy.
Data analysis: Analyze data from all customer operations to understand which strategies are working and which need to be improved. These findings are invaluable lessons that will be used in future customer operations to optimize products and services to continuously improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Fourth, the conceptual model design of the customer management system
1. Entity Model for Customer Domains:
Customer: A person or organization that buys a business's products on behalf of the company. Customer information includes name, mobile phone number, contact information, address and other information.
Membership: Customers who register as a member can enjoy membership privileges such as points, tiers, and member-only benefits.
Customer tags: Used to describe the characteristics of a customer, such as "high value", "new customer", or "potential churned customer". Tags serve as metadata to provide a convenient way for customers to categorize and market.
2. Entity Model of Customer Behavior Domains:
Customer behavior records: specific behavior data used to record customers' interactions with the enterprise. It usually records the behavior data of customers on various touchpoints of the enterprise (such as websites, mobile apps, physical stores, etc.), including but not limited to page visits, product browsing, search queries, purchase behaviors, feedback suggestions, etc.
3. Entity Model for Client Asset Domains:
Points account: Used to track and manage the points earned by customers through purchases, participation in events, etc. Points can often be redeemed for goods, services, or specific offers.
Tier Account: A record of a customer's membership level in the business, usually based on the customer's spending amount, points, or growth value.
Entitlement account: Used to record specific benefits that customers have, such as coupons, more points for purchases, etc.
Stored Value Account: Used to record a customer's advance payments in a business, which customers can use to purchase goods and services.
These accounts are interlinked in client asset management. For example, a customer's level may affect the privileges they receive in their equity account, and they can spend the balance in their stored value account, which can be used to earn more points, etc. Through these connected plays, companies can provide customers with more personalized services and motivate customers to spend more.
4. Entity Model for Customer's Operating Domain:
Crowd templates: The basic framework and attributes used to define the target customer group, these templates may include the age range of the customer, purchase frequency, purchase preferences, etc.
Crowd Portrait: Based on the crowd template, further refinement is included to include descriptions of more specific customer groups. It usually contains more detailed rules, such as category preferences, zodiac signs, and rules for spending in a certain store.
Crowd rules: Define specific conditions or logic used to identify or classify customer groups, such as customers who purchase more than once a month, participate in Goddess Day activities, etc.
Operational plan: Contains the specific marketing plan that the enterprise executes for a specific customer group.
Fifth, the application architecture design of the customer management system
The application layer defines the application functions of the software system, which is responsible for receiving user requests, coordinating domain layer capabilities to perform tasks, and returning the results to users.
- Customer management: The core function module is responsible for collecting and updating customer information, including personal information, contact information, consumption habits, member information, and attribution information (such as sales or consultants). This module is the foundation of the CRM system, supporting the operation of other modules, providing detailed customer information to help enterprises better understand and serve customers.
- Customer tagging: Through the labeling management of customers, customer segmentation and personalized services are realized. It supports functions such as creating new tags, deleting tags, batch tagging, and automatic tagging, as well as synchronizing to the tag library of third-party platforms such as WeCom.
- Crowd operation: Implement targeted marketing strategies for different customer groups. It includes crowd selection (selecting target customer groups according to specific criteria), scenario marketing (designing marketing activities according to the needs of different scenarios), interactive marketing (improving customer engagement through interaction), and promotional tools (such as limited-time discounts, buying gifts, etc.) to achieve precision marketing.
- Reach channels: It defines a variety of channels for enterprises to communicate with customers, including outbound calls, text messages, mini program subscription messages, WeChat group sending, etc. This module enables businesses to effectively communicate with customers through multiple channels, providing product information, promotions, and services to enhance the customer experience.
- Data analysis: Conduct in-depth analysis of customer data, including member performance, member portraits, RFM model analysis (an analysis model based on the customer's latest purchase time, purchase frequency, and purchase amount), consumption analysis (including consumption habits, repurchase rate, etc.), points and stored value analysis. Through these analytics, businesses can gain key insights to improve marketing strategies and enhance customer service.
- Customer Assets: Manage the value of customers' benefits, including stored value (pre-deposit), points, benefit cards, coupons, and custom benefits. This module helps businesses build and maintain customer loyalty programs that encourage customers to spend and repurchase by providing value and offers.
The domain layer is the core of business logic, focusing on representing business concepts, business state flows, and business rules, and precipitating reusable system capabilities.
1. Customer base
Basic customer information: Maintain the basic data of customers, such as name, mobile phone number, contact information, address, etc. This is the core information for identifying and contacting customers.
Custom data items: Allows enterprises to add additional information about customers according to business needs, providing flexibility to adapt to various business scenarios.
Customer Change Records: Record changes to customer information and provide historical data tracking for auditing and checking service quality.
Customer attribution: Clarify the relationship between the customer and the company's internal personnel (e.g., sales team, account manager) in order to clarify the responsibilities of customer management.
Customer authorization: Manage the permissions authorized by customers to enterprises, such as data access and processing permissions, to ensure the legality and compliance of data processing.
Customer merge processing: Solve the problem of duplicate customer records and maintain the accuracy and consistency of data by merging similar or duplicate customer records.
Behavior details: Collect and record specific behavior data of customers, such as page visits, product browsing, and purchase behavior.
Transaction behavior statistics: Summarize and count customers' transaction behaviors (such as purchase frequency, amount, etc.) to support business analysis and decision-making.
2. Customer Labels
Tag metadata: manages the definition of tags, including tag names, types, and scopes, which is the basis of tag management.
Label template management: Create, edit, and delete label templates to quickly apply and reuse labels.
Automatic tagging: Automatically tag customers based on predefined rules, such as "high-value customers" based on purchase behavior.
Manual tagging: Allows users to manually add or modify tags for customers, providing flexible customer segmentation and management capabilities.
Batch tagging: Allows users to add the same tag to multiple customers at once, greatly improving work efficiency compared to a single operation.
Tag Sync: Tag sync keeps customer tags consistent across different systems and platforms. For example, sync to tag libraries from other CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, or third-party systems such as WeCom.
3. Client Assets
Points: Manage the points earned by customers through purchases or activities, as well as the rules for the use and expiration of points.
Benefits: Define and manage the various benefits that customers have.
Privilege Cards: Manage the customer's membership card or privilege card, and its corresponding benefits and conditions.
Grade: Divide the customer level according to the customer's consumption behavior, and manage the rules for the promotion and promotion of the level and the corresponding rights and interests.
Write-off of benefits: Handle the operations and records of customers' use of benefits (such as coupon use, points redemption) to ensure the correct write-off of benefits.
Credits: Manage customers' prepayment balances, support the use, top-up and refund of credits.
Sixth, write at the end
The goal of a customer management system (CRM) is to establish, develop, and maintain good customer relationships to improve the profitability and competitiveness of a business. CRM systems can enhance customer loyalty, improve sales efficiency and marketing effectiveness, and promote internal collaboration.
The business processes of customer management include data precipitation, customer tagging, crowd selection, scenario marketing, reach conversion, and data analysis.
In the conceptual model design, the entity models of the Customer Domain, the Customer Behavior Domain, the Customer Asset Domain, and the Customer Operations Domain are introduced.
The application architecture design of the CRM system includes functional modules such as customer management, customer tagging, crowd operation, reach channels, data analysis and customer assets.
This article was originally published by @汤师爷 on Everyone is a Product Manager. Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash and is licensed under CC0.
The views in this article only represent the author's own, everyone is a product manager, and the platform only provides information storage space services.