Customer care emerges as key investment area during the recession: IDC
- 20 August, 2009 12:42
- Comments 2
Customer care is emerging as a key IT investment area for CIOs in the current downturn, according to the findings of a new IDC poll.
While most organisations are reducing or freezing their investments in IT, 23 percent of the Australian-based respondees indicate they will still invest in IT solutions that can help them increase earnings or save costs.
Chief among these areas is customer care, which nearly half of the respondents saw as a way to generate revenue, with many ready to progress beyond traditional customer relationship management, IDC says.
About nine out of 10 respondees also said they had increased their focus on the customer because of the economic downturn.
"Australian companies see customer care as essential to growing top line revenue and not just keeping customers happy to achieve their growth strategies despite the downturn," Linus Lai, associate research director at IDC Australia, said of the results.
"New advanced customer care tools, such as customer analytics, customer database management and new web-based tools, are much more on the agenda for these types of companies. They tend to appreciate the value of customer targeting and engagement more than companies with a more reactive approach.” The poll also found that despite the impact of the economic downturn, the top business priority of more than half the companies surveyed was to increase earnings over cost control.
The results of the poll were released ahead of IDC’s Advanced Customer Care and Retention conference, to be held in Sydney on 8th September.
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Comments
adamson@digitalinvestor.com.au
Looking inward at tools is less than half the answer
The new focus on customer care needs to go far beyond investing in traditional "customer management" or "customer engagement" systems.
The biggest shift in history in <b>customer buying processes</b> is taking place in the social web. For example the Australia Centre for Retail Studies showed that more than 50% of people research their purchases online before entering a store.
It's not only B2C. In B2B serious research is done online in the social web.
B2B researching online is the biggest shift in buying habits ever and is one of the fundamental reasons behind the establishment of the Social Media Academy.
We've seen the trend to users claiming back the power of informing themselves for quite a while, but is has now <i>hit critical mass</i>. That's why it is so important for businesses to get on top of this shift.
The ramifications are profound. Let me mention just three.
1. If you as a business are not there in those social places and spaces where these discussions are taking place then it seems obvious that you are not participating in those decisions - yet some major businesses have trouble grasping this.
2. If you are there, or not there, that action or actions then becomes part of your brand behaviour and thus over time adds or subtracts from your brand.
3. If you have not analysed all your touch points, along with where your customers are actually informing themselves in the social media, plus how your branded versus non-branded communities align, plus understanding how to manage and benefit from this across your organisation, then you are risking business benefit and brand value. It's complicated.
Bottom line - spending on more tools is one thing, but like always the tools are not the answer to better customer care, it's the planning and execution and attention to detail and coordination, and the social media make all this harder than ever.
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy, Australia
http://www.socialmedia-academy.com.au
Chill
Customer care emerges as key investment area during the recessio
Customer care plays a vital role now a days in BPO companies. It also shows that they are now focusing on customer care strategy due to economic recession. What is important is to make the customer satisfied in achieving their growth strategies despite economic recession.
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