Last month, we had a workshop with one of our mFarmer grantees to understand their Agricultural Value Added Service (Agri VAS) customer retention management (CRM) process and implementation plan. Here I have captured some of our thoughts regarding effective CRM for Agri VAS.

What is Customer Retention Management?

It is difficult to define CRM as it is a variable and debatable issue. However a wide base of analysts view CRM as a strategic process to help organisations retain existing customers and avoid them defecting to other competitors. Customer retention is only possible when there is a quality relationship between the customer and supplier (in this case the Agri VAS provider). Usually a customer will stick to a particular brand or product as far as his or her basic needs continue to be properly fulfilled, and they will not opt for taking a risk by going for a new product. For example, I’m a loyal Apple fan and continue to buy Apple products despite the fact that there are lots of other great mobile phones available on the market. The higher the possibility of retaining customers, the higher the probability of net growth.

An example of a CRM initiative for Agri VAS

To carry out an efficient and effective CRM process, it is very important for Agri VAS providers to carefully evaluate and analyse the statistics that are relevant to issues which need to be resolved. In the context of Agri VAS, it is important to have a usage statistics tracking system in place to track the number of repeat customers vs. single time users, the average length of call, the location of farmers and so on.

Scrutinizing this relevant data can prove to be effective because appropriate actions can then be taken as a process of CRM. Generally reports, data and stats provided to higher management can be ineffective if they are too generic and don’t pinpoint those tricky areas where actions are required to avoid losing customers.

In this blog I am using an example to show how the analytics of an interactive voice response (IVR) menu can help to decide the CRM decisions to increase customer stickiness. If an IVR service is launched on a subscription model and the price packs don’t suit or match the users’ expectations, then the service will end up losing customers.

In such a situation, CRM decisions need to be taken after analysing the IVR access statistics such as the length of call and the information the customer listened to. If the statistics show that most of the people who use the IVR service hang up after listening to the price of different available packs, then it’s worth investigating and re-designing the price-packs or introducing other price-packs such as a Pay-As-You-Go model or free sampling to the users who didn’t go further than listening to the price options.

Once the changes have been made to the service, it needs to be decided what communication channel will be used to reach out to those users who hung up after listening to the price options, and try to bring them back to the service. Whether it’s by sending out SMS, using OBD (Out Bound Dialling) messages, or having call centre agents speak to the users directly, the message that the service has been changed (in this case, the price-points), needs to be communicated if users are going to be pulled back to the service.

This is an example of a CRM initiative. Here the channels and applications used (i.e. the SMS, OBD and Call Centre) can be defined as CRM solutions but actually it is a combination of the initial process of gathering the statistics, analysing them and taking the action to adapt the service and then inform the users to come back and try again.

Now we are waiting to see how this works in real life for the Agri VAS we’re working with under the mFarmer Initiative, and what lessons we can take away for the industry – hopefully some exciting things to share with our readers soon!