With the development of China's market economy and the continuous improvement of various laws and regulations, the business environment for enterprises is becoming increasingly fair, and competition among enterprises within the same industry is intensifying. How enterprises innovate and maintain customer loyalty is a question that every enterprise manager must consider. Customer loyalty plays a decisive role in the transmission of enterprise brand value. As the saying goes, "customers vote with their feet," which illustrates this principle. Customer relationship management theory originated in the United States in the 1980s and was first proposed by the Gartner Group. Thanks to the rapid development of information technology, CRM theory has gradually formed several basic components: marketing, sales management, customer care, and service and support. Currently, many mature management software products have been developed, and CRM has basically become a necessary project for companies.

 

　　1 Overview of Basic CRM Theories

 

　　Management guru Peter Drucker once said: "The ultimate purpose of a business is to create and retain customers." Enterprises need to establish win-win cooperative relationships with customers to achieve mutual profit.

 

　　1.1 CRM Theory

 

　　Research on CRM began in the early 1980s, and in 1997, the American company Gartner formally proposed the concept of CRM. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. Different experts have given different definitions, but in summary, it is a business strategy for selecting and managing valuable customers and their relationships. Its ultimate goal is to effectively manage customer information resources, provide products and services that satisfy customers, establish long-term good win-win relationships with customers, attract new customers, retain old customers, and improve efficiency and competitive advantage to make profits for the enterprise.

 

　　1.2 Customer Relationship Assessment

 

　　Customer value is the customer's perceived gain or loss when considering the level of expectations. Customer perception will have an important impact on the development of customer relationships.

 

　　As shown in Figure 1, the higher the customer value, the more the enterprise's profit grows. With more profits, the enterprise has the ability to provide better services to customers, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. (See Table 1, Table 2, Table 3)

 

　　1.3 Customer Satisfaction

 

　　CRM is an effective means to improve customer satisfaction. Practice shows that a 20% increase in customer satisfaction leads to a 51% increase in each salesperson's sales, a 21% reduction in sales and service costs, a 1/3 reduction in the sales cycle, and a 15% increase in profit. A 5% increase in customer satisfaction will double enterprise profits. Two-thirds of customers leave their suppliers because of insufficient customer care. In an increasingly competitive, customer-oriented market environment, companies should strive to improve customer satisfaction.

 

　　The customer satisfaction index system will change with changes in the market and customers. Factors that customers do not care about today may become the "focus issues" that customers pay attention to tomorrow. Therefore, enterprises should conduct continuous tracking research on customer expectations and requirements to understand the changing trends of customer expectations and requirements, and make timely adjustments to the customer satisfaction index system and take corresponding measures.

 

　　2 Current Customer Management Status and Problems of CMC Group

 

　　2.1 Introduction to CMC Group

 

　　CMC Group is an enterprise engaged in the sales and maintenance of engineering machinery equipment, located in a Southeast Asian country. It mainly sells engineering machinery equipment from companies such as Shantui Group, Zoomlion, and Foton Motor. It currently has more than 60 employees, and its sales in 2012 reached more than 20 million US dollars.

 

　　2.2 Analysis of CMC Group's Business Environment

 

　　2.2.1 Political and Economic Environment

 

　　The country where the enterprise is located is in the ASEAN economic zone and is a traditional friendly country with China. The Chinese government provides the country with a large amount of interest-free or low-interest loans to help with its infrastructure construction. Although the country is currently politically stable and its economy has developed rapidly, due to years of civil war, its infrastructure is backward, lacking water and electricity, and transportation roads and bridges are in urgent need of construction.

 

　　2.2.2 Competitors

 

　　Currently, the competitors faced by CMC Group are mainly divided into two categories: one is agents of non-Chinese brand machinery equipment manufacturers, including many internationally renowned engineering machinery brands such as CAT, KOMATSU, HITACHI, VOLVO, HYUNDAI, etc.; the other is agents of Chinese brands, such as Sany Heavy Industry, LiuGong, XCMG, etc. Foreign brands, with their excellent quality and good international reputation, occupy most of the market share of used machinery equipment in the country. However, their agents are unwilling to increase investment in new equipment sales due to high prices and the small market size of the country. Therefore, CMC Group currently does not face fierce competition from them in new equipment, and its main competitors are other domestic brands.

 

　　2.3 Analysis of CMC Group's Customer Management

 

　　2.3.1 CMC Group's Customer Positioning

 

　　Since China provides high-quality loans to the country, the loans are mainly used for infrastructure construction such as road building, bridge construction, land leveling, and hydropower station construction. Some large Chinese and local construction groups use their public relations capabilities to obtain relevant projects, and CMC Group can sell equipment to them, basically focusing on large customer purchases.

 

　　2.3.2 Current Status of CMC Group's Customer Management

 

　　CMC Group is a medium-sized engineering machinery equipment sales company in its country. Its customer process management relies on marketing representatives visiting customers or on the personal relationships between the company's president and customers to understand customer demand information. It does not use professional CRM software.

 

　　2.3.3 Problems in CMC Group's Customer Management

 

　　Overall, there are three aspects.

 

　　(1) CMC Group has developed too fast, and its internal management is backward. CMC was founded in 2011, and the company is very young. Chinese management personnel in the management team have problems of "acclimatization" to the business environment of the country and lack localized management experience.

 

　　(2) Implementation of concepts. The management has put forward the slogan of "customer-centric," but it is not effectively implemented among ordinary employees.

 

　　(3) Technical problems: lack of information technology support leads to low efficiency in sales processes and customer service, and the information technology level of enterprise employees is low.

 

　　3 Summary and Recommendations

 

　　(1) CMC Group should improve the quality of internal management. First, it should make full use of the advantages of information technology within the group to reduce internal customer management costs.

 

　　(2) Accurately grasp the overall information of the engineering machinery industry, purchase specialized analysis software, or cooperate with relevant companies to accurately position future major customers and do a good job in information collection for current customers.

 

　　(3) Pre-purchase investigation of machinery is important. Customers need to be investigated, and strong support from company management is needed in customer reception.

 

　　(4) Reduce customer information tracking time, improve the efficiency of marketing process management, and fully monitor marketing representatives.

 

　　(5) Conduct comprehensive quantitative statistical analysis, make comprehensive and accurate dynamic records based on business processes, and build a scientific information transmission system.

 

　　References

 

　　[1] Simon Knox, Stan Malelan, Adrian Payne, et al. Customer Relationship Management [M]. London: Butterworth-Heinemann.com, 2002.

 

　　[2] Chen Mingliang. Discussion on the Framework of Basic Theoretical System of Customer Relationship Management [J]. Journal of Management Engineering, 2006, 20(4): 36-41.

 

　　[3] Li Zhongqing. Research and Design of Customer Relationship Management System for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises [D]. Harbin: Harbin Institute of Technology, 2007.

 

　　[4] Huang Sha. Research on Customer Relationship Management of Peugeot 4S Store [D]. Jinan: Shandong University, 2013.

 

　　[5] Jia Meng. Design and Implementation of Customer Relationship Management for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises [D]. Chengdu: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, 2013.