Customer Relationship Management

Overview:

         Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information. The strategies, processes, people and technologies used by companies to successfully attract and retain customers for maximum corporate growth and profit.

This is a fairly broad term that is used to describe a company’s strategic relationship with its customers. A strategic approach whose goal is to get everyone in an organization, not just the marketer, to recognize the importance of customers.

Reference material, accompanied by documentation issued by an authoritative body and referring to valid procedures used to obtain a specified property value with uncertainty and traceability. 

Customer Relationship Management is not a software program but a holistic business philosophy. The aim of CRM is to create added value for both.

Features of  customer relation management:

CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way.

For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth.

According to one industry view, CRM consists of:

•        Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing   campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team.
•   Assisting the organization to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices)
•        Allowing the formation of individualized relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them the highest level of service.
•        Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers understand and identify customer needs and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.
•       Many organizations turn to CRM software to help them manage their customer relationships. CRM technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM, depending on the vendor. Recently, mobile CRM and the open source CRM software model have also become more popular.

Why you need it:

• Provide Better Customer Service : CRM systems give businesses many strategic advantages such as the ability to personalize relationships with customers regardless of which employee is service them.
  

• Repository can be maintained : on customer profiles, thereby treating each client as an individual and not as a group. This way, every employee can be better informed about each customer's specific needs and transaction profile.CRM also helps the organisation to easily adjust the level of service to reflect the customer's importance or status.
  

• Increase Customer Revenues : Using CRM data, marketing campaigns can be co-ordinated more effectively by ensuring that promotions do not target customers who have already purchased that particular products.It also ensures higher customer retention by introducing 
  

• Discover New Customers : CRM systems help the organisation in identifying potential customers. By keeping a track of the profiles of their existing clientele, the business can easily come up with a strategy to determine the kind of people they should target such that it returns them maximum clientage.CRM systems facilitate cross-selling (offering customers complimentary   products based on their previous  purchases) and up-selling (offering customers premium products in the same category).
  

• Help Sales Staff Close Deals Faster : CRM helps the businesses in closing deals faster, through quicker and more efficient responses to customer leads and customer information.
  

• Make Call Centers More Efficient : With each employee having access to customer details and order histories, targeting clients becomes easier. The information can be accessed instantly from anywhere within the company.