CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to express having the ability to organize and maintain a connection with clients, customers and service agents with regards to business relationships and customer satisfaction. CRM translates directly to customer relationship management. Everybody who profits from CRM has their own definition of what it is, but they're agreed as to what it is not: CRM isn't about technology any more than hospitality is about throwing a welcome mat on your front porch.

CRM is a philosophy that puts the customer at the design point; it's getting intimate with the customer.  CRM is more as a strategy than a process. It's designed to understand and anticipate the needs of the current and potential customer base a company has. Once you nail that, there’s a plethora of technology out there that helps capture customer data and external sources, and consolidate it in a central warehouse to add intelligence to the overall CRM strategy. Buying technology before you have your CRM business goals clearly in mind leads to disaster.

CRM is an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers. By enabling organizations to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, departments, lines of business, and geographies, CRM helps organizations maximize the value of every customer interaction and drive superior corporate performance.

Today’s organizations must manage customer interactions across multiple communications channels—including the Web, call centers, field sales, and dealers or partner networks. Many organizations also have multiple lines of business with many overlapping customers. The challenge is to make it easy for customers to do business with the organization any way they want—at any time, through any channel, in any language or currency— and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organization that recognizes them at every touch point.

Why Is CRM Important to an Organization? The benefits of CRM are clear: By streamlining processes and providing sales, marketing, and service personnel with better, more complete customer information, CRM enables organizations to establish more profitable customer relationships and decrease operating costs.

• Sales organizations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics such as revenue per sales representative, average order size, and revenue per customer
• Marketing organizations can increase campaign response rates and marketing-driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead-generation and customer-acquisition costs
• Customer service organizations can increase service-agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times, and request-resolution times