Customer relationship management

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|What is CRM? |
|CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used tolearn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop |
|stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological |
|components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process |
|that will help bringtogether lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends. |
|What is the goal of CRM? |
|The idea of CRM is that it helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior ofcustomers and the value of |
|those customers. If it works as hoped, a business can: |
|provide better customer service |
|make call centers more efficient|
|cross sell products more effectively |
|help sales staff close deals faster |
|simplifymarketing and sales processes |
|discover new customers |
|increase customer revenues|
|That sounds rosy. How does it happen? |
|It doesn't happen by simply buying software and installing it. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must first decide what kind of |
|customer information it is looking for and it must decidewhat it intends to do with that information. For example, many financial institutions |
|keep track of customers' life stages in order to market appropriate banking products like mortgages or IRAs to them at the right time to fit their |
|needs. |
|Next,the organization must look into all of the different ways information about customers comes into a business, where and how this data is |
|stored and how it is currently used. One company, for instance, may interact with customers in a myriad of different ways including mail campaigns,|
|Web sites, brick-and-mortar stores, call centers, mobile sales force staff and marketing and advertisingefforts. Solid CRM systems link up each of|
|these points. This collected data flows between operational systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that can help sort |
|through these records for patterns. Company analysts can then comb through the data to obtain a holistic view of each customer and pinpoint areas |
|where better services are needed. For example, if...