School of Information Systems

CRM Implementation for Customer Focus

During the competition of the market, it is important for Company to manage and pay more attention on Customers’ need. That’s why every Company needs to implement Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is providing organization with a single complete view of every customer, and providing the customer with a single complete view of the organization and its extended channels. There are five major application components for CRM Systems, as follows :

  1. Contact and Account Management: Capture and track relevant data about past and planned contacts.
  2. Sales: providing software tools and data sources to manage sales activities, and optimize cross-selling (selling related products to current customers) and up-selling (selling better products than the one currently purchased).
  3. Marketing and Fulfillment: automate direct marketing, scheduling, and tracking, and assist in scheduling responses and requests, while capturing relevant information for the marketing database.
  4. Customer Service and Support: provide customer service software tools, and real-time access to the customer database.
  5. Retention and Loyalty Programs: enhancing and optimizing customer retention and loyalty to retain existing customers.

(James A. O’Brien, 2010).

CRM can help Company to identify customers’ profile and get in touch with customers. CRM also can be defined as an organizational backbone. Nowadays, social media has develop very fast and it will be easier for the company to access customer’s profile

In business competitive there are many factors to consider, it’s not only about products, sales and marketing, they need to consider about CRM as well. As a business solution CRM also supply the capacity to interact with consumers in a real-time in order to fulfilling the organizational goal. Customers are the important assets for company as organization, because company can’t do business without customers.

The CRM software helps company to maintaining their relationship with customer through their database. The database record customer info such as customer habit, hobbies, likes, dislikes, etc. CRM software also helps company to make a decision which related to customers, such as launch new product for suitable customers, improve product quality, and reveal customers’ hidden pattern.

CRM has become a critical business process as a result of competitive pressures; the need to achieve cost efficiency in order to be a low-cost, high-quality supplier; a recognition of the fact that customers are not equal in terms of their profitability; and, knowledge that customer retention can significantly affect profitability. CRM and supplier relationship management provide the critical linkages throughout the supply chain (Lambert, 2010). So, CRM is important for the company, especially for customer focus. With CRM, we will have deeper relationship with Customers and can increase the number of customers. We also implement some Customer Retention Program to create loyal customers for our Company.

To implement CRM software, Company should know first about customers’ profile with maintain good relationship with customers and always understand and consider customers’ need and complaints. It will be helpful if Company can access social media account from customers, so Company can more understand about customers’ preferences and activities. After that Company can start to implement CRM software in line with Company’s core business processes with full support from IT and Marketing Departments. CRM has several capabilities to support business process from the Company, as follows:

graph2 

Figure 1. CRM Capabilities

Source : (Wang & Feng, 2012)

So, CRM is important for the Company to gain more customers and successful in the market.