Now that the so-called Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age and becoming less influential as consumers, marketers are focusing on Generations X, Y, and Z. Technological developments in the past 40 years, particularly the advent of the Internet, and now social media, mean that marketers not only have a new avenue to approach these consumers, but that their very responses to marketing and advertising initiatives have changed. It’s simply not possible to put a print ad in a magazine and call it a day anymore—companies with something to sell have to be more aggressive, creative and responsive than ever.
This means that it takes more than a spreadsheet and a file cabinet of ad mock-ups to promote your product. Generations X and beyond demand the superior capabilities provided by a cloud-based customer relationship management, or CRM, solution.
Customer relationship management is a system that integrates data collection, electronic communication channels and knowledge base management to provide companies with a complete picture of their prime demographic. The multiple channels through which customers can connect with your product—not to mention with other customers—means that you need a comprehensive way of capturing, analyzing and sharing data. Customer relationship management helps sales teams sell better, marketing teams shape more effective campaigns and help desk agents to provide meaningful, personable and above all, useful customer service.
These generations have, for the most part, grown up with computers. This means that they want information presented instantaneously and through a variety of exciting media. They also insist on companies demonstrating accountability, transparency and accessibility. Even the largest companies can no longer afford to be aloof monoliths; they have to make it easy for customers to share opinions and complaints with them.
The most successful companies know how to do this, through the avenues provided by social media and mobile communications. Take the coffee giant Starbucks, which may have a reputation for $5 lattes, but is also known for listening and responding to its customers. A dedicated Web site, My Starbucks Idea, lets users spout off and make suggestions, as well as vote for their peers’ ideas. Starbucks has a huge presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, uses text messages to reach out to customers, and gives away free iTunes song downloads to its customers. In other words, Starbucks meets its customers wherever they can be found—online, using an iPhone or another cellphone, on the streets, and even in grocery stores, where the coffee company successfully sells not only whole-bean and ground coffee, but brewed coffee beverages and other items.
Especially for those companies that are accustomed to old-fashioned methods of marketing and advertising, this brave new world of Web-based marketing may seem overwhelming. That’s where the use of cloud-based customer relationship management applications, to keep track of it all and simply things so you can actually use them, comes in. Capturing, sorting, routing and reporting data—all in real-time, with an intuitive interface that doesn’t take forever to master—means that less administrative time is spent compiling reports or analyzing metrics.
The CRM apps can be customized to generate charts, graphs, text-based reports and more, and to distribute those to any employee who may need to see them. Keeping track of customers, their preferences, account history and social networking presence is a difficult task, but it’s also necessary—why not harness the power of cloud-based systems that were developed to make things easy? That way, you can get back to connecting with customers in a meaningful way—one aspect of successful business that will never change.
Interesting hypothesis, I think that you might be onto something here. Generation Y needs both immediate feedback, when appropriate, as well as support. CRM might be a decent way to accomplish this.