Customer Relationship Management - Overview

Customer Relationship Management (CRM), also known as relationship marketing or customer management, is an information technology industry term for the methodologies, strategies, software, and other web-based capabilities used to help an enterprise organize and manage customer relationships. The goal of CRM is to aid organizations in better understanding each customer's value to the company, while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of communication. CRM captures, analyzes, and distributes all relevant data from customer and prospect interactions to everyone in the organization. This distribution of information helps an organization better meet customer, product, and service needs.

CRM has replaced traditional marketing techniques that focused on key marketing mix elements, such as product, price, promotion and place. By being too functionally-based, traditional marketing techniques neglected the customer in the after-sales process and failed to meet customers' desires. CRM emphasizes customer retention over customer acquisition and is recognized as one of the most viable tools used to further a company's success in the highly competitive business world.

There are three major areas that focus on customer satisfaction: sales, marketing, and service. The functionality of and between these three fields is essential to successfully connecting a company's front and back offices to facilitate effective, enterprise-wide coordination. The professional sales force predicts and proposes the real-time analysis of information and distributes

this information to the company and business partners. Marketing concentrates on personalizing customer preferences and offering them satisfying experiences. Service is associated with the companies' call centers and coordinates interaction between Web, e-mail, and other communication medias. These fields are developed further with the help of CRM automation.

CRM Software Information and Solution

They are many CRM software and CRM vendors in the market, there are more and more SMI and SME looking for CRM software. But does you business really need it ? Please read the articles below before you plan to buy CRM software.

What is CRM software? CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to learn 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 bring together 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 of customers 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 simplify marketing 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 decide what 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 advertising efforts. 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 someone has a mortgage, a business loan, an IRA and a large commercial checking account with one bank, it behooves the bank to treat this person well each time it has any contact with him or her. How much does CRM cost? A study in year 2001 survey of more than 1,600 business and IT professionals, conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute found that close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. That would appear to indicate that CRM doesn't have to be a budget-buster. However, the same survey showed a handful of respondents with CRM project budgets of over $10 million.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer Relationship Management continues to be the most vibrant, critical and evolving technology category in today's market. CRM today is no longer just about enterprise software. Rather, today's CRM is a flexible solution where you can mix software, hosted services and other components to meet your specific business needs. Who are your best customers? What can you do to retain them? How can you attract others like them? How can you increase your customers profits? The truth is that most companies have difficulty understanding and managing customer life cycles and profitability. This is due to problems designing and executing effective marketing campaigns, and problems measuring their effectiveness.

Figure1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Cube

A survey of more than 1,600 business and IT professionals conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute found that close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. Clearly, CRM doesn't have to be a budget-buster. Whats more, Forester estimated that CRM revenues will grow from $42.8 billion in 2002 to $73.8 billion in 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 11.5%. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must decide what kind of customer information its looking for and what it intends to do with it. Look at how customer information comes into a business, where and how its stored, and how its used. Then have company analysts comb through the data to get a complete view of each customer and pinpoint areas where better services are needed. One way to assess the need for a CRM project is to count the ways a customer can access the company. The more there are, the greater the need for the single centralized customer view a CRM system can provide.

Figure 2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Cycle

Customer Relationship Management enables real-time availability checks, contract management, billing management, fulfillment visibility, and order tracking, giving you the features and functions necessary for marketing planning, campaign management, telemarketing, lead generation, and customer segmentation. In addition, CRM allows you to offer ongoing customer care across all channels with a customer-interaction center, Web-based customer self-service capabilities, service and claims management, field service and dispatch, and installed-base management. CRM helps your business:

Provide better customer service Make call centers more efficient Cross-sell products more effectively Have sales staff close deals faster

Simplify marketing and sales processes Discover new customers Increase customer revenues

Take a moment to count all the critical business processes associated with ordering, fulfillment, payment, billing, employee benefits, sales, marketing and customer service. In your opinion, what percentage of these processes is completely and effectively digitized? Is it 10%, 30%, 50% or more? Our research indicates that the average is between 20 and 30% higher for Global 2000 companies, lower for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into customer behavior and to recognize the value of those customers. Customer Relationship Management goes beyond sales, marketing and customer-service applications into business intelligence, analytics, hosted applications, mobile capabilities and much more! By thinking more insightfully about what your customers are worth, you can focus your resources on attracting and keeping the right type of customers. This focus, in turn, will make your CRM efforts more productive and position you better for innovation and growth. For more information, please read Customer Relationship Management Product.

CRM Software
CRM Software houses all the critical business information an organization needs to develop effective sales, marketing and customerservice strategies. The CRM Software solution empowers an organization to build stronger, more profitable relationships with customers and prospects. The CRM Software system can be run in a Windows and/or Web environment, which means that employees whether in the office or on the road are always in touch with the most up-to-date data and the most effective communication tools. CRM Software allows you to target key customers, accelerate and streamline sales, marketing, and the order-to-installation life cycle, and back up your compelling products or services with great support. The CRM Software system also helps staff keep abreast of customer needs. By organizing and recording information, employees can reduce customer frustration by not asking the same questions over and over.

CRM Software allows small companies to look big. If you want to offer 24/7 support but dont have the means to hire 24/7 support staff, use your CRM Software package to develop an automated, self-help program that answers client questions. CRM Software allows your business to:

Streamline Customer Care . Efficiently manage inbound service calls involving billing inquiries and payments, customer-

service requests and tickets, thereby improving first-call resolution rates and customer satisfaction. Streamline Sales Cycles. Streamline sales cycles through the ability to convert opportunities to quotes or orders. Run Marketing Campaigns. Retain your most valuable customers by performing effective marketing campaigns. Optimize Field Service . Help companies optimize field resources in real time, even when field personnel is located outside of wireless coverage areas. Create and Validate Orders . Streamline and automate order capture and processing, ensure order accuracy, reduce orderentry training time, allow sales representatives to maximize margins with custom offers, and provide account representatives with up-selling and cross-selling recommendations. Manage Contract Compliance . Create and execute complex agreements, ensuring that delivery of benefits or execution of charges is driven by customer compliance with contracts. Provide Loyalty Management . Provide a scalable, flexible and complete customer-loyalty management system.

Our CRM Software has fast and simple deployment, upgrade and maintenance options, and does not require much time and effort to implement and test customizations. Its been proven that up to 80% of support issues have been encountered already. If the information from those encounters is saved, you can quickly and accurately answer any future questions. If you can answer your customers question on that first call, the confidence your customer has in your company increases tremendously, thus improving your relationship and increasing customer retention. With the help of CRM Software this and many more processes are easily available. Here are some features to keep in mind when choosing the CRM Software thats best suited to your companys needs. Top 10 Features to Look for in a CRM System: 1. 2. 3. 4. Sales-cycle analysis Integration to your back-office accounting system Open, industry-standard technology Seamless flow of information between corporate systems and remote employees 5. Real-time reporting and analysis 6. Automated workflow 7. Contact and campaign management 8. Multiple language and multicurrency capabilities to support global business 9. Ability to easily customize your solution to fit your business needs 10. Scalability to accommodate future business growth For more information, please read Customer Relationship Management.

Customer Relationship Management(CRM)

After you attract your customers, you must know how to retain them for repeat purchases, brand loyalty, etc. Establishing a relationship with your clients gives you crucial feedback for product research & development as well as responding to user preferences. To do this today, you need a customer relationship management (CRM) solution Once a product that could only be afforded by big corporates, open source systems now make it possible for organisations of all sizes to go direct. We install and provide support and consultancy on Vtiger CRM. We outsource and offer a wide range of Information and Communication technologies like call centers, intranets, extranets, for companies, schools, colleges, libraries, internet cafes etc. Available is a system that can multiply a single desktop CPU into 10 computers, you only have to acquire monitors mice and keyboards saving you up 90% in IT hardware, maintenance and hidden costs. Contact us for a free quote Systems for marketing (also known as marketing automation) help the enterprise identify and target its best customers and generate qualified leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is managing and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue. Marketing automation also encompasses capabilities for managing customer loyalty, lists, collateral, and internal marketing resources.

Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a companys interactions with customers and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processesprincipally sales related activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and

Customer Relationship Management - effective techniques to dramatically improve profitability

Progressively increase customer lifetime value, and ensure you retain your best customers

ost businesses are awash with more data than they can deal with - prospect and customer lists, sales

data, market research, and complaints and yet their staff do not use this data to effectively manage customer relationships. In almost all cases sales and service staff are servicing customers who are not generating the most profits - which means that the businesss most important customers are being neglected. Little wonder that some of your best customers decide to leave. An effective Customer Relationship Management solution can ensure your marketing and sales teams have customer information that they can easily use to significantly grow the value of your customer base - typically:

Your most profitable customers, and what characteristics make them so. Changes in customer purchasing behaviour either an opportunity or threat.

 Gaps in product portfolios indicating cross-sell, up-sell, and repeat-sell opportunities.

Over the past decade, customer relationship management solutions have evolved to the extent that they enable a business to grow the lifetime value of its customers, as well as counter customer defections. Successful CRM implementations have enabled companies to leapfrog their competitors - often taking the dominant position in their industry through their superior profitability and customer retention levels.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

What is Customer Relationship Management

CRM is a term that is often referred to in marketing. However, there is no complete agreement upon a single definition. This is because CRM can be considered from a number of perspectives. In summary, the three perspectives are:

Information Technology (IT) perspective The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) perspective Business Strategy perspective

CRM and Information Technology

As we have discussed, CRM is more than just software. For the purposes of this introduction Information Technology (IT) and CRM have three key elements, namely Customer Touch Points, Applications, and Data Stores. This section is based loosely upon Raisch (2001) The eMarketplace.

Customer Touch Points are vital since your business has a marketing orientation and focuses upon the customer and his or her current and future needs. This is the interface between your organisation and its customers. For example you buy a new car from a dealership, and you enter a showroom. The dealership is a contact point. You meet with a salesperson whom demonstrates the car. The salesperson is a contact point. You go home and look at the car 9

manufacturer's website, and then send the company an e-mail. Both are contact points. Other contact points include 3G telephone, video conferencing, Interactive TV, telephone, and letters. Applications are essentially the software and programmes that support the process. Incidentally, this is what some would call CRM - but we know better. Applications serve Marketing (e.g. data mining software* and permission marketing**), Sales (e.g. monitoring Customer Touch Points), and Service (e.g. customer care). Data Stores contain data on every aspect of the customer, and the Customer Life Cycle (CLC). For example, an organisation keeps data on the products you buy, when you buy them, and where they are sent. Data is also kept on the web pages that you visit and the products that you consider, but then do not buy. Leads are stored here. Data on the life time value of individual customers is stored here, as well as details of how and when the customer was recruited, how - and for how long - individuals have been retained, and details of any products that have been extended to individuals are also stored. The data is analysed using Applications. *Data Mining is where an organisation evaluates large Data Stores for patterns, or relationships between groups or individuals (or segments). Applications present 'patterns' in a format that can be used for marketing decision-making. ** Permission Marketing is where a customer elects to accept (or 'opt-in' to) marketing material from an organisation e.g. where you buy insurance and the vendor asks if you wish to receive further details from them, or similar organisations. It is so called because marketers need your 'permission' to market to you. Permission marketing can occur at any of the Customer Touch Points. The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) and CRM The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) has obvious similarities with the Product Life Cycle (PLC). However, CLC focuses upon the creation of and delivery of lifetime value to the customer i.e. looks at the products or services that customers NEED throughout their lives. It is marketing orientated rather than product orientated, and embodies the marketing concept. Essentially, CLC is a summary of the key stages in a customer's relationship with an organisation. The problem here is that every organisation's product offering is different, which makes it impossible to draw out a single Life Cycle that is the same for every organisation.

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Let's consider an example from the Banking sector. HSBC has a number of products that it aims at its customers throughout their lifetime relationship with the company. Here we apply a CLC. You can start young when you want to save money. 11-15 year olds are targeted with the Livecash Account, and 16-17 year olds with the Right Track Account. Then when (or if) you begin College or University there are Student Loans, and when you qualify there are Recent Graduate Accounts. When you begin work there are many types of current and savings account, and you may wish to buy property, and so take out a mortgage. You could take out a car loan, to buy a vehicle to get you to work. It would also be advisable to take out a pension. As you progress through your career you begin your own family, and save for your own children's education. You embark upon a number of savings plans and schemes, and ultimately HSBC offer you pension planning (you may want to insure yourself for funeral expenses - although HSBC may not offer this!). This is how an organization such as HSBC, which is marketing orientated, can recruit and retain customers, and then extend additional products and services to them - throughout the individual's life. This is an example of a Customer Life Cycle (CLC). Another important point is that a lifetime CLC is made up many shorter CLC's. So, for example, Volkswagen Cars retains a customer for many years and one can predict the products that meet a customers needs throughout his or her family lifetime. However the purchase of each car, will in itself be a CLC with many Customer Touch Points. The consumer may need a bigger vehicle as his or her family expands - so they visit VW's website and register. The customer reviews models and books a test-drive with her or his local dealer. He or she decides to buy the car and arranges finance. The car is then delivered from the factory, and returns every year for its annual service. Then after three years, the customer decides to trade in his or her car, and the cycle begins again. The longer-term life cycle is simply the shorterterm life cycles viewed consecutively.

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Business Strategy and CRM

We now consider the Business Strategy Perspective on CRM. Here, we propose a model, which is a hybrid, and typical of many of the models and diagrams of CRM that you will find on The Internet and in popular books on the topic of eMarketing/eCommerce. The model has three key phases and three contextual factors:

Three key phases:

1. Customer Acquisition. 2. Customer Retention. 3. Customer Extension.

Three contextual factors:

4. Marketing Orientation. 5. Value Creation. 6. Innovative IT.

1. Customer Acquisition - This is the process of attracting our customer for the first their first purchase. We have acquired our customer. Growth - Through market orientation, innovative IT and value creation we aim to increase the number of customers that purchase from us for the first time. 2. Customer Retention - Our customer returns to us and buys for a second time. We keep them as a customer. This is most likely to be the purchase of a similar product or service, or the next level of product or service. Growth - Through market orientation, innovative IT and value creation we aim to increase the number of customers that purchase from us regularly.

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3. Customer Extension - Our customers are regularly returning to purchase from us. We introduce products and services to our loyal customers that may not wholly relate to their original purchase. These are additional, supplementary purchases. Of course once our loyal customers have purchased them, our goal is to retain them as customers for the extended products or services. Growth - Through market orientation, innovative IT and value creation we aim to increase the number of customers that purchase additional or supplementary products and services. 4. Marketing Orientation - means that the wholes organisation is focused upon the needs of customers. Customer needs are addressed by the Three Levels of a Product whereby the organisations not only supplies the actual, tangible product, but also the core product and its benefit, and also the augmented product such as a warranty and customer service. Marketing orientation will focus upon the needs of consumers for all three levels of a product. (N.B. 'market' orientation and 'marketing' orientation are not the same). 5. Value Creation - centres on the generation of shareholder value based upon the satisfaction of customer needs (as with marketing orientation) and the delivery of a sustainable competitive advantage. 6. Innovative IT - is exactly that - Information Technology must be up-to-date. It should be efficient, speedy and focus upon the needs of customers. Whilst IT and/or software are not the entire story for CRM, it is vital to its success. CRM software collects data on consumers and their transactions. Huge databases store data on individuals and groups of individuals. In some ways, CRM means that an organisation is dealing with a segment of one person, since every consumer displays different purchasing habits and preferences. Organisations will track individuals, and try to market products and services to them based upon similar buyer behaviour seen in other individuals (e.g. When Amazon tells you that customers that viewed/bought the same product as you, also bought another product).

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