Foreclosure sales in California rose about 32 percent in the month of May of 2009, and 35 percent in April of 2009.  Just the California foreclosures from the month of May represent more than $8 billion in total loan value.  That means $8 billion worth of homes were foreclosed upon.  However, the good news is that lenders continue to voluntarily postpone the majority of foreclosure sales.    Lenders, such as banks and mortgage companies, are doing everything possible to delay foreclosures, and that includes working with California loan modification attorneys and homeowners on loan modifications.

In fact, of the foreclosures scheduled, lenders postponed 40 percent at their own request and another 33 percent at the mutual request of the lender and the borrower.  This means that lenders are absolutely willing to renegotiate the terms of mortgages, and homeowners who are in danger of (or are in the midst of) foreclosure proceedings still have hope.  Foreclosures often seem like the end of the world, and even with the new legislation, they can be overwhelming.  However, as evidenced by these statistics, lenders are not interested in taking over your home.  The Feldman Law Center has seen lenders take unique steps to negotiate with borrowers and homeowners in an attempt to keep the homeowner in their home, making affordable payments.

Things are particularly tough for homeowners in southern California.  Researchers from Columbia Business School said that over 30 percent of borrowers in San Diego and San Bernardino counties owe more than the refinancing limit with Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac.  In Los Angeles county, there are 29 percent of borrowers who do not qualify for refinancing because of the less-than-5-percent restriction from those two major mortgage lenders.

However, loan modification attorneys can help homeowners and borrowers overcome these restrictions.  Foreclosures seem to run up on people quicker than they think, in part because they are focusing on their immediate crisis (such as paying a car loan) and not the looming one of foreclosure.  However, it is never too late to contact a California loan modification attorney to help you keep your home and avoid foreclosure.  A qualified California loan modification attorney will know the laws, know the lenders, know the mortgage companies and be able to offer quality advice on a variety of subjects.  Trying to fight a foreclosure without a qualified loan modification attorney is a bad idea.

Visit us at www.feldmanlawcenter.com or call 800-588-0425.

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People would often seek for something that could make their tasks bearable. Because they are usually loomed with tight schedules, they tend to engage with something that could make everything easier. A call center as being a propeller of diverse services coexists with all other parties to give relief to people as to their anxieties in work and in time management. It proves to be very helpful in providing essential services that meet the needs of customers.

Inbound service, as being one of the services of a call center, affirms its worth in giving resolutions to the usual problems of people. Giving them quality of this service means building a good relationship with them. So how does an inbound service improve customer service relationship while meeting their needs?

Here are some reasons on how inbound services could actually improve customer service relationship:

1. Inbound Telemarketing.

Inbound telemarketers are usually there to answer basic mortgage related questions of customers, to set up an appointment with prospects and to make sales with people who are miles away. Inbound telemarketing this time could improve customer service relationship, consider this: A customer may see a late at night infomercial of a product. Very late as it seems, he is puzzled on how to actually purchase the product right way. While watching, a contact number pops out from the TV screen, he dials it on his phone, and the company that he rings routed the call to a call center, then a telemarketer takes the call. The caller will say his concern and the telemarketer will do necessary things to help him. And there it goes, after a while of conversation, the telemarketer have completed a sale for him, and the customer who is very satisfied in purchasing the product would actually feel confident in asking help with the same telemarketing company again. This case conveys that giving quality and fast telemarketing service boosts customers trust in acquiring your service all over again, thus, customer service relationship is strengthened.

2. 24 Hour Answering Service. .

This service increases your client’s satisfaction rate. It provides an efficient service any time of the day or night. This gives them assurance that they could always have a present help when they would need it most.

3. Telephone Answering Service.

Because people are disappointed with automated voice answering, giving them live person to talk highlights their value of being customers—customers that are cared and given much importance. This provides your customers real voice responses on how to fix their appointments, to generate sales and the like.

4. Answering Service

This service also provides customers real voice responses far better than automatic answering machines with recorded messages. Again, customers would feel valued by the way they are treated over the phone.

5. Business Answering Service.

No matter what business you are in, having people that would answer business calls for you even if you are out of office is very important. Take this for example, even you are in vacation, your customers would always want to have a way to contact you, so knowing that you could have a company that offers operators that answer all those calls would entail a lot of benefits.

Improving inbound call center services could actually mean improving customer service relationship. Setting up worthy services for your customers would make them satisfied and comfortable, thus, giving them the chance to happily working with you. The value that you are giving them would leave desirable impact that would motivate them to have your service always.

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Customer Relationship Management

“Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.”

– Philip Kotler

Introduction

In today’s competitive business customer is the king and important member who is said to contribute towards the overall success of a business enterprise. Identifying and building a strong relationship with the loyal customers is always a competitive advantage to every business enterprise in form of saving cost on promotions and sales expenses in finding new customers. The concept of customer relationship management is powerful and dynamic in modern marketing scenario.

Meaning of CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the systematic process of managing detailed information about the loyal customers to build a continuous business relationship for the overall long run success of business enterprise.

Understanding the concept of CRM

CRM helps the business to provide better service ti its customers with new market offerings of products and services integrated with adequate marketing communication to a target group of loyal high value customers.CRM reduces the company’s eager search for new customers in the market for its product and helps to concentrate on its existing customers which builds brand loyalty for their products and services.

Creating a strong connection with loyal customers is a strategic key to a long term marketing success .For establishing a profitable business a company need not always search for new customers in a short span of time in its target market the company should always look forward to meet the changing needs of the existing customers, the satisfied customer will always add word of mouth which is powerful tool for gaining wide acceptance and popularity for the product or service. For example: airline services of jet airways, Vodafone teleservices, etc.

Here are few tips for building a strong business relationship with your loyal customers:

Ø Maintaining a customer profile: Customer  profiling enables the company’s marketing department to list out consumer’s likes and dislikes, where can be a target market can be established, how to provide  innovate products and services to retain the existing customers,etc.
Ø Reducing customer defection: A group of professionals can be chosen and provided appropriate training to build a friendly relationship with high value customers to cater their regular changing needs.
Ø Encouraging cross selling and up selling: A marketer may encourage a customer to buy a product which is related to similar brand offered by company to market or a complementary product.
Ø Profiling competitor’s strengths and weakness: Identifying competitor’s strengths and weakness of market offerings to similar target customers of one which the company intends to do will allow the company to devise intelligence/audit system that can maintain the track record of competitors in the market.
Ø Maintaining good call center management and auto response system: A company having a good call center management team and best manager’s may always provide assistance to customers against regular queries and problems.
Ø Customer relationship analysis (CRA): A company can choose actual process of collecting and analyzing data about its customer in order to better understanding about their marketing efforts to improve the sales and render customer service and reduce costs.

Case study

Bharti Tele-Ventures is one of India’s leading private sector telecom operators. Its cellular business, AirTel, is a leading mobile telephony brand. Like any telco, Bharti considers information technology a key business enabler. “For telecom, IT is like bread and butter. We believe it plays two significant roles-it works as a support system, and it can also be a business driver. Thus IT is very important to us,” says Amrita Gangotra, vice president of Information Technology at Bharti. It had a WAN in place with a mix of leased lines and E1 and E3 lines. The company also has an extranet in place through which it extends different applications to its dealers and partners. “We have an extremely large infrastructure based on products from multiple vendors,” says Gangotra. This includes a range of high-end servers from Sun and HP. “In the telecom business volumes are very large. We have millions of records and we process them every day, so for us storage is in terabytes,” she adds.
Bharti also has a storage area network (SAN) in place. The main data centre is located in Gurgaon, Haryana. As far as software is concerned, some of the applications that are running on its network are billing, fraud management, revenue assurance and data warehousing. They also have some internal-facing applications like Oracle Financial and Oracle HRMS.

The case for CRM

Initially, when Bharti started operations, the whole system was run manually. “At that point of time only 40 percent of our customer issues were getting resolved-this has now gone up to about 90 percent,” reveals Gangotra.
“It is vital for us to manage the expectations of our customers and provide them with innovative products and services in a manner which makes them loyal,” explains Gangotra. To achieve this, Bharti needed the right tools. “It is this need that made us opt for a CRM (customer relationship management) solution,” she says.

Cherrypicking a solution

Today Bharti is using the Oracle CRM platform. “As part of our vision, we intend to provide AirTel services anywhere and at any time. A customer should get the same quality of service no matter which of our call centres he contacts. This has been our vision, and because of that we have gone in for a centralized application like CRM,” Gangotra adds.
Before choosing its CRM tool, Bharti evaluated many options. It considered factors like proper workflow automation, facilitation of knowledge sharing, and integration with the billing system. After a thorough evaluation exercise, it decided to go ahead with the Oracle CRM platform.

Roll it

After starting its services in Delhi, Bharti acquired many circles and sought new licences in other circles; whenever they got a new license, they implemented the CRM tool immediately. But they had to put in a migration strategy in those acquired circles which had an existing subscriber base. “The migration had to be done in such a manner that the existing customer base did not suffer; we have already completed this in 14 of the 15 circles that we operate in,” says Gangotra. The goal was that all the circles would go live by the first quarter of 2004.
The biggest challenge for Bharti was to have a unified process in place. Once this was done they faced the challenge of imparting training. “When you go in for such a large-scale implementation you will definitely have problems,” says Gangotra. “We also had certain technical difficulties during implementation, but we were able to overcome them.”
The CRM strategy at Airtel revolves around two aspects: operational CRM and analytical CRM. The first is about helping their call centres in the workflow part, helping them in their day-to-day activities. The second provides staff with the required information on customers; this is used for business development activities. Together they help Bharti provide better services to its customers.

Tailor-made schemes

Gangotra says it is important to understand and segregate customer needs depending on the product and services he is buying. “One of the primary things that we have done in this solution is the segmentation of customers. With this, AirTel is now able to give its customers more value for money,” she says. With the help of CRM, they are able to provide customers different schemes and services depending on airtime usage. If the customer is a heavy user then they have some specific schemes; for normal users they have other schemes. Apart from this, they have also managed to segregate their workflow with the help of the CRM tool.

Source: http://casestudy.co.in/

Summary

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the systematic process of managing detailed information about the loyal customers to build a continuous business relationship for the overall long run success of business enterprise. Understanding and identifying the area for its successful implementation provides a competitive advantage for every business enterprise in the long run of the business with its marketing strategies the success story of Bharti Airtel is a live example of corporate success and best management practices and corporate heights of achievement.

Key words:

Customer profiling, customer defection, cross selling and up selling, customer     relationship analysis, call center management and auto response system.

Pradeep Raj.S

MBA Student

Bangalore, India

Email: Pradeepraj1@live.com

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