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18/09/2014 07:25:44 AM

Relationship Marketing: Easy to understand, hard to do

Building relationships with customers, (relationship marketing) is understood as a business activity providing products and services to satisfy customer needs, creating benefits for businesses and building long-term relationships with customers. Developed from the 2000s, relationship marketing is considered a salvage for organizations when consumers are becoming smarter. Before considering the main content of the article, let's examine briefly the benefits of relationship marketing:

The fist benefit is to increase sales. This is obvious because the result of relationship marketing is to build and maintain loyal customers, these customers will return to buy products when needed or even introduce products to their relatives and friends. Rather, each customer who is satisfied will become a communication unit because customers will spend more confidence for information from relatives, friends rather than from companies. I have ever experienced excellent service from Amazon, then, when teaching relationship marketing, I'm always telling my story, and for the last 2 years, I have repeated this story to a many students. Amazon really deserves this, does it? Moreover, customer support gives companies a stable sales in times of crisis.

The second benefit is creating close cooperation between departments of company. Why this happens? The answer simply lies in pursuing relationship marketing helps all departments  pursue the common goal, which is satisfying and lasting relationship with customers. This goal also contributes in restricting the conflict among the departments in the same enterprise.

In addition, relationship marketing helps businesses reduce cost of attracting new customers. In a study, the autho mentioned that the cost of attracting new customers twice the cost of retaining existing customers which lies in creating beliefs that already exist in customer loyalty. We could see this point in strategies of Vietnamese telecom companies. Nearly 10 years ago, when telecommunication cost is quite high, and mobile service is only for high-income customers, parallel to this, the network firms tried to attract new customers with the attractive sales promotion campaign such as buying a new SIM, customers’ accounts are doubled in next 5 deposits, so the customers will leave the company when they could get more beneficial sales promotion programs for the others. However, the telecommunication market becomes mature recently and the strength of the network firms lie in how many loyal customers they own. This is showed  in the strategy of the firms as they perform more benefit for the existing customers.

Thus why relationship marketing is easy to understand but hard to do?

Để thực hiện marketing quan hệ, ban đầu, doanh nghiệp phải xây dựng hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu khách hàng. Hệ thống này bao gồm các thông tin về khách hàng như tên, độ tuổi, giới tính, địa chỉ, lịch sử mua hàng, thói quen mua hàng. Căn cứ vào hệ thống cơ sở dữ liệu này, doanh nghiệp mới thực hiện các chương trình tri ân khách hàng như tặng thẻ VIP, khuyến mãi, gởi quà tặng chúc mừng sinh nhật, gọi điện thoại cung cấp thông tin về sản phẩm mới. Tuy nhiên, đây cũng chính là trở ngại cho doanh nghiệp khi thực hiện marketing quan hệ. Như chúng ta đã biết, doanh nghiệp thu thập dữ liệu của khách hàng thông qua thông tin khi khách hàng mua sản phẩm, thông tin từ các phiếu bốc thăm trúng thưởng, từ việc khách hàng đăng nhập vào website của doanh nghiệp hay thậm chí là mua lại từ doanh nghiệp khác. Nhưng cũng có thể thấy một thực tế là độ chính xác của những dữ liệu này không cao vì tâm lí ngại cung cấp thông tin cá nhân của khách hàng. Hơn nữa, cùng với thời gian, những dữ liệu này cần được cập nhật liên tục để đảm bảo chương trình marketing quan hệ tìm chính xác đối tượng khách hàng mục tiêu.

In order to answer this question, we will consider some conditions for marketing relationship to appear.

The fist condition is building customer database. Customer database is the system consists information about customers, such as name, age, gender, address, purchase history, shopping habits. This is the foundation for some loyalty programs. However, this is also an obstacle for the marketing relationship. As we all know, firms collect customer data through some sources such as sales person, sweepstake program, even purchasing from other companies. However, the customers affraid in giving their personal data so its so hard to build and update customer database exactly.

Another difficulty is the customization relationship marketing programs. We all know, each client has unique need, thus company should consider the customization in business activities. I have seen how my father disappointed when receiving vase from Viettel on his birthday. Flower vase is probably not appropriate gift for a male client even he married. And then, my father's attitude toward Viettel has changed. This showed that, the gift becomes meaningless if it is not given to suitable customer. But how could companies customize customers when they only have some marketing staffs to serve millions of customers? This is really not easy problem to solve when organizations want to increase the effectiveness of relationship marketing programs.
In summary, everyone could realize the benefits of relationship marketing, however, the companies should consider many problems when they want to apply this in their marketing programs, for instance building the valid customer database, understanding customers’ need and customizing solution for each customer.

Huynh Linh Lan

REFFERENCES

1. www.ama.gov

2. www.strategicdriven.com