Customer relationship management (CRM)

What is CRM?

It is a strategy and process used to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviours in order to develop relationships with them.

This process aims to connect different players with in and organization so as to coordinate their efforts in creating an overall valuable series of experiences, products and services for the customer.

It also depends on building together pieces of information about customers, sales, Marketing effectiveness and market trends so the organization can sell and market its products and services more effectively.

The process is mediated by a set of information technologies that focus on creating two-way exchanges with customers, so that firms have an intimate knowledge of their needs, wants, and being platers. In this way CRM helps companies understand, as well as anticipate the needs of current and potential customers. It should be said that CRM is just the opposite of “one size fits all”, it deals with Customers or an individual level.

CRM Approaches

Operational CRM:

Designed to provide support to business process including sales, marketing and customer service, each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer’s contact history and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customer can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company overtime without having to describe the history of their interaction each time i.e:Link.net Call center

Another example of operational CRM is the sales force automation (SFA) which is designed to automate sales force related activities, such as lead tracking. Such tasks performed as follows:

• Keeping lists of leads.
• Assigning list segmented to sales people.
• Alluring list contacts to be called or e-mailed.
• Generating reports.

Analytical CRM:

Designed to analyse customer data for a variety of purposes such as:

• Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimize marketing effort.
• Design and execution of specific customer campaigns including customer acquisition and customer retention.
• Analysis of customer behaviour to aid product and service decision making (pricing, new product develop)
• Financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis.
• Prediction of the probability of customer defection.

Collaborative CRM:

Its ultimate goal is to use information collected from all departments to improve the quality of customer service.

Example: a feedback from a technical support could be used to inform manufacturing staff about specific services and features requested by customer.

Geographic CRM:

Combines data collected from different trading areas with marketing information to be analyzed. This enables the organization to examine potential customers and manage existing customers.