Deliver Order from Chaos

"CRM (Customer Recession Management) is a function of marketing which, in times of an economic downturn, is perhaps the most important thing one should be doing. When the times are good, no one really listens customers. Now that the money is not easy to come by, suddenly businesses are looking around empty shop floors and claiming that the recession took away their customers. Recession does not make money disappear; it makes its holders a little more wary about where they want to put it. People are still buying products and services that are solving their problems. If they aren’t coming to you, perhaps you don’t have what they ‘need’ or they have gone off to your competitor."

"A report by market research company Forrester titled The Economic Necessity Of Customer Service [PDF] suggests several recession busting strategies for companies. These include investing in online customer chat sessions, online co-browsing tools that reach out to customers, social networking communities and self-service channels."

"A major issue [Forrester Research's Natalie] Petouhoff finds with many companies is that the c-level executives do not realize just how important customer service is to the bottom line. In the report, she lists four ways in which service affects organizations' revenue:

"Doesn't this recession feel like it's been going on for quite some time? Well, it has—literally (in the global economy) as well as figuratively (here in the pages of CRM). We've dedicated the entire issue to the topic, including this month's columns and Insight stories—but we'll still have only barely scratched the surface."

Check out this week's issue for a host of articles with great advice during troubled times, including the two stories above.