Customer relationship management is nowadays very important for companies. The more loyal clients are, the higher their profitability.

If companies have all invested heavily in expensive IT systems to provide automated support to their customers, a good number of them have unfortunately forgotten the importance of the more traditional customer relation tools such as phone, mail or email support.

The recent survey by “Human Consulting Group” over the behavior of the 200 biggest French companies is quite enlightening.

It was not a surprise that the best companies for customer relations were in the luxury sector. For companies such as Hermes, Lancôme, Moet & Chandon, customers need extra care and it is often only because of that, that customers are ready to pay the higher prices.

On the other hand, IT, transport and telecoms companies are in very competitive sectors, selling to the masses and cost cutting is often what makes the difference in prices leading often to poor service to the customers. Loosing a few customers does not seem to be essential for these and they very easily sub-contract, for cost reasons, the traditional CRM to outside firms which do not have the same motivation as their own employees. Dell is certainly the best example for this. Fortunately, there are reminders for this kind of behavior, such as loosing market share for example. This is generally a wake-up call for the general management of these companies and in the case of Dell they are presently taking actions to correct this.

Good customer support is what brings customers back. Repeat sales make companies profitable. Companies may have immediate gains by not investing in a traditional CRM, but long term, owing to the push of customers’ associations, they loose!