Summary of Article 'Get Inside the lives of Your Customer'

Hi All,

In the today’s world companies spend millions of dollars in development of customer relationship, but in turn it doesn’t exist in vacuum. In an article “Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers”, entitled by Seybold P.B., 2001 discuss about ‘Customer scenario’. Customer scenario is basically handling the customer situation; companies can deliver much more value to their customer and in turn achieve a great loyalty. Seybold P.B. explains the customer scenario through example of the two shopper goes in to Best Buy looking for a new refrigerators; first shopper wants to replace the old refrigerators and second wants to for his new house, in this case first shopper scenario might be called ‘emergency replacement of refrigerators’; the second ‘furnish home’, so if the sales person doesn’t know the situation of the customer it cannot fulfill the need of that customer. Thus by understanding customer scenario (situation) it helps the customer in saving time, fulfilling supplementary needs and services, which help the supplier to its customer. Further, combined with the capability of internet technology as an interactive, effective, and non – costly means of interactions between customers and the organizations, businesses are most likely to reap the long term benefit as experienced by National Semiconductor, the grocery chain Tesco, and on-line marketplace Buzzaw.com. I belive that these three companies are successful by developing a deep understanding of their common customer scenarios and marketing plans.

Creating customer scenarios can be viewed as one critical strategy that supports a good CRM. To create a customer scenario is not at all difficult, but it requires the people capability to think beyond the customer requirements. There are few basic steps which map out the customer scenarios:

• Select target customer.
• Select goal of customer.
• Activities of the customer.
• What resources, technology require by the customer.

Thus from the article of Seybold, I believe that customer scenarios will play an important role in CRM. But the way to improve CRM is not restricted to the development or creation of customer scenarios. Indeed, should make use of the technology that is available in today’s world, such as Data Warehouse, Data Mining, and etc to create a prospective strategy for effective CRM, which helps in expand sales and deepen loyalty.