Strategic Customer Management

Overview and Purpose

Strategic customer management is an integral part of ensuring the satisfaction of your stakeholders.  Understanding your market segmentation, defining the market needs, developing programs to service the market, and satisfying existing and new customers with appropriate services, are all instrumental in strategic customer management.

So why is strategic customer management often seen as so difficult? One of the main problems is that there is:

• too much emphasis on providing current services (especially those that have been around for a long time);
• too little emphasis on developing a leadership role and thinking and acting strategically in the sector or industry the organisation represents;
• lack of acknowledgement of the power of espousing a vision; and
• a scarcity of new services that assist customers in a changing environment.
  

This publication is about the things that everyone can do to strategically manage their customers, whether you are the Executive Director, a membership/stakeholder manager or any other staff member who deals with customers. This publication covers segmentation, needs assessment, why customers use our services, why they continue using them, and why they stop using them. It looks at techniques you can use in your day-to-day work, as well as those techniques that are best introduced organisation-wide.

Topics Covered

• customer recruitment;
• customer retention; and
• customer relationship management system