Customer Relationship Management of Web 2.0

CRM Application for Popular Websites with Participating Users

Apr 21, 2009 Ali Eftekhari

Customer relationship management is very popular in the current competitive market, as companies need to keep constant customers rather than simply selling their products. The first connection of web 2.0 to customer relationship management is the great opportunity for serving the customers by online support, and so forth.

For this purpose, customer relationship management software was designed to server the customers in a solid system. In general, companies utilize web 2.0 to service their customers. Thus, web-based companies, which are essentially based on web 2.0 has more chance (and also need) to use customer relationship management. The essence of web 2.0 is to provide a service rather than a product.

Although almost all websites are 'for profit', websites can be divided to two groups of commercial and non-commercial. The former one refers to the websites with paid membership or selling products, and the latter one is related to the free services on the internet (though the website has revenue from online advertisements, and they are indeed non-commercial just for their customers).

In fact, people commonly believe that customer relationship management is only for commercial services, as a company is responsible in respect with the customer who has paid. However, the existence of non-commercial websites (making revenue from Ads) depends on the visitors, and they are considered as customers.

Free Service to the Users, Revenue for the Owner

People also commonly believe that CRM is not applicable to free services on the internet. The argument is that since a website is kindly offering some free services, the visitors should be thankful without any expectation of support.

Surprisingly, however, the revenue of the so-called non-commercial websites can be as much as the commercial websites, where their revenue comes from inline advertising.

Roughly, a common range of online advertising revenue is CPM = $1-10, which means $1-10 net revenue from every 1000 page impressions. This is the value for one single ad, and there are few ads around the page. This is a significant value, comparable with commercial websites.

Necessity of CRM for Non-Commercial Websites

As quoted above, companies wish to keep a customer via CRM systems, because upon a good service, the customer will be a potential buyer again; and it is easier than convincing a new buyer. In other words, all expenses of CRM are just to reserve a future buyer for a later purchase; whereas, for a so-called non-commercial website, keeping a member means earning revenue from every single visit.

It is evident that CRM is more important for websites offering free services. Due to the rapidly growing demand of CRM and its vast range of applications, the efficient techniques of CRM are now well developed. In general, CRM solutions are widely available to the web-based business owners.

CRM is a Shortcut to Success

The sentences like “it is not a kind of service we support” and similar ones have been widely heard from the support teams of websites offering free services (e.g. free softwares, scripts, etc). Such experts need to spend a little more time (as they are completely familiar with the subject) to satisfy their customers, and surely the satisfied customers are highly profitable in comparison with the time they spend.

A successful story can be found in numerous technical forums. Most of them have been formed by a patient owner who has valued the members by trying to answer their questions and to resolve their problems.

As a result, the members remain on such a useful forum, and then contribute to the community. On the other hand, people find useful discussions (and resolved problems) via search engines, and join the community. Little by little, the forum grows and more experts come and enjoy serving others. This is the real story of most of leading forums.

CRM vs. SEO

People usually do not use CRM and are not successful in the competitive environment of the internet, because, they prefer to find tricks and easiest ways. In the latter example, the forum owners are not actually ‘patient’, and just wish to have a crowded forum, as people talk and the owner makes money.

Instead of focusing on the content and service, people seek for SEO tricks to promote their websites. This does not mean that SEO is not important, but one needs to have something interesting, then promoting to the public.

Customer Management System

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Customer Management System - Customer Relationship Management of Web 2.0