Market Research and CRM

One of the best applications of Market research is in the area of customer relationship management. It helps an organization to get an accurate and sharp feedback on their performance and through different customer opinions helps them to understand what customers feel about them. The following are some subjects in which market research could give valuable feedbacks:

1. Getting useful information for future market growth.
2. Getting an idea on new product feasibility and acceptance by customers in market before making investment on testing and producing the product.
3. Assessing cost sensitivity of customers.
4. Finding new features of products which can attract customers and knowing what advantages and benefits they could provide.
5. Finding the hidden aspects what a product possesses and how to leverage those aspects to bring them in front of customers.
6. Assessing level of customer’s satisfaction with the organization specifically in the fields of performance, technology, quality, service, cost and completion schedule.
7. Determining strong aspects for leveraging and weak aspects for making improvements to finally increase satisfaction level in customers.
8. Creating database on information of competitors and treating this database as the reference point or benchmark as per feedback from customers.
9. Identifying main areas in which the organization is leading the competitors and areas in which they are lagging behind with them.
10. Identifying market trends and reasons for these trends.
11. Identifying reasons for poor business and determining which areas are mostly affected with this.
12. Providing business solutions for typical problems in all the aspects.
13. Determining purchasing channels which the customers prefer. Do they prefer online purchase or human contact?
14. Identifying future perspectives.

In many organizations the officials and executives are most of the times face to face with customers. The customers rarely provide any negative feedback being face to face as it may be embarrassing for them to do so. In the same manner they also hesitate in giving positive feedback because they are afraid that by doing so they could weaken the negotiation power with the suppliers. It is therefore very important for the organization to perform market surveys and analyze the actual feedback which they are unable to get it revealed from the customers.

In other cases where customers are not face to face, the suppliers do not get the chance to get feedback from them directly. They only get indirect feedbacks from agents or middlemen which are rarely atomistic and do not perceive the actual meaning. Business results and conclusions require more detailed and analytical information. Hence, there is always an essential need for accurate market research or survey to be performed to get proper and reliable customer feedback.

In CRM system, this market research is embedded like market intelligence which is based on real-time customer information. This information is integrated in such a way that it is accessible centrally with the organization irrespective of departments. But it is also validated so that the confidential information is not accessed by the department which does not have the rights to see it. For example, notifications for late payment by customers should only be visible to accounting department and not to customer service departments which are exposed to customers. All the information is stored centrally in one CRM system but is integrated and customized in this intelligent way.

Integration of market research and CRM has turned out to be very efficient as it saves time for analysis and gives more accurate and authentic results as compared to the tradition market research tools.

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