Staying in touch, and tapping the pockets of existing clients is a time-honoured business strategy and there are any number of CRM specialists who will charge plenty for the software to do it. But in this series, Scott Nelson, managing vice president at Gartner recommends five CRM strategies that companies can undertake now while not breaking the bank, 5 "Zero Cost" CRM Strategies

1. Target Customer Communities
... future CRM strategies will rely on "creating online communities of customers" using social media, including Facebook, Twitter and other websites. These Web tools are quite free, of course. [at least for now]
"The economic downturn provides a great opportunity to begin experimenting in this area," notes the report, "and Gartner advises companies to set up accounts on the various websites and learn what they do and don't do, and how users interact" with a company's brand and systems.

Not bad advice, especially if staff have some 'business development' time available because the order book is slim. However, don't let your marketing people anywhere near these tools and above all, don't expect to 'own' the community. Being an effective participant probably means responding to complaints and fixing them. Defending the problem or criticising the customer will go nowhere.

2. Scour Customer Analytics
The average enterprise has already bought and installed analytic and customer intelligence packages (with varying degrees of success), and economic downturns are great times to tap into that computing horsepower. "Many companies have more information than they know what to do with," states the report, "and now they have the opportunity to put this to good use..."

Of course, as the report points out, decision-makers using the analytic tools should remember that customer behaviors may change significantly when the economy finally does improve.

They are also, probably, different from the assumptions built into the CRM system when times were good. But the key here is that many organisations have so much information that they are being swamped by it and have no way of figuring out what it means anyway. Our organisations will not be saved by computing power but by having customers and supporters who will choose to give us their scarce dollars rather than any other choice.

Perfect example of what NOT to do. My neighbour complained to me that Telecom NZ had called to say they had noticed she called one number very often (her daughter) so they could set it up for those calls to cost only $1. While that was nice, they then used it as an opportunity to try and sell her a whole lot of stuff she had no interest in and her 'records' did NOT indicate any desire for. Now she is angry and telling the neighbour. Not a good strategy, but I'll bet it was driven by their CRM system.

3. Review Customer-Segmentation Tactics
Gartner research finds that many segmentation strategies are based on "psycho-demographics, profitability or account attributes," notes the report. "However, a down economy provides companies with the opportunity to review their segmentation strategy and see if it really is the very best one that they could have."

Probably it makes such a review mandatory, especially since some of the best (most regular and p[rofitable) customers have been buiying on credit, have just had a nasty shock about what they can really afford and have pulled their horns in sharply. The implication is that the most profitable customers may be gone and that the organisation will need to survive on sustaining the loyalty and support of the less  enthusiastic clients, that will take a major rethink in how you go about your business.

4. Fix Broken CRM Processes
Process is "often an overlooked part of CRM and in many cases all that CRM technologies have done is taken out old, broken processes and made them run more efficiently," notes the report. But they're still bad processes.

This is an almost eprfect statement of the problem. IT, and especially the Internet, accelerates and amplifies whatever you are doing by several orders of magnitude. if what you are doing is attractive, useful, interesting and engaging (YouTube, Twitter and possibly Facebook) you will have that amplified, but get it wrong, like Telecom above, facebook with its redesign or Dominoes Pizza recently, and that too is amplified and accelerated out of your control very quickly.

Do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons would seem to be the place to start. Not trying to bamboozle your customers would run a close second.

5. Change Your Organizational Structure
"At the end of the day, CRM is all about change. Changing from product to customers, changing age-old processes, changing enterprise mindsets, and changing how companies relate to customers," notes Gartner's Nelson. "All of this can be done without new systems, and the challenging economic environment may give companies just the chance they have been waiting for."

This may not cost much money, but the psychological and emotional cost can be huge.

While the C in CRM is Customer, the M is for management and the cynic in me says that it still offers the illusion that customers and their relationship with the company can be managed, ie, controlled, directed and rpedicted. It was never true, in a down economy it is even more so, but in an Internet mediated 'information economy' is is dangerously deluded to assume.

For a different take on cost-conscious CRM strategy, see David Taber's recent CIO.com article, "CRM on the Cheap: Five Strategies That Really Work." Even better is one of the most prescient documents of the last decade; The Cluetrain Manifesto, most of which still holds good or better and most of which is foreign territory to your marketing department.

So how are you approaching your profitability/ survivability? Rigid cost cutting is increasingly popular, hunting free services and strategies is always good, offering better deals is getting harder but at least if you can hang in there, losing the competition looks like being a major factor.

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