Customer Relationship Management

In today’s era, the competition between companies is getting tougher. Therefore a company should focus more on “What do customers need?”. Companies must be able to make a customer feel comfortable, but making a customer feel comfortable is not easy. Therefore, a system called Customer Relationship Management, commonly abbreviated as CRM, can help a company to make customers feel comfortable doing transactions with the company.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a system that integrates corporate strategy, business methodology, and technology to accomplish a myriad of goals for companies that want to operate in a customer-driven environment. It means that CRM is needed for the company to help them understand more about their customer. The reason why CRM is necessary for a company is that without any CRM, a company would have a hard time understanding their customer understand, and because of the difficulty in understanding their customers then, there is a possibility that the business/company will have trouble in running the business even the worst cases scenario they cannot continue their business/company. CRM provides support that will help the company with their front-end facing functionality, for example, marketing, customer service, and sales.

Like every other system, CRM also has its history. From 1980 – 1990, a few companies started to use IT to automate their customer processes, and in late 1990 those companies started to integrate that system, which is called CRM. With CRM, companies began changing the market environment as mass marketing gave way to focus on the segment, and now it’s turned into target marketing or individual marketing. For example, a company will use collected consumer/customer data to create an advertisement based on that data.

There are a few types of CRM, such as Operational CRM, Analytical CRM, and Collaborative CRM. Operation CRM provides front-end and back-end support for the company, such as sales, marketing, administrative, and customer service. Analytical CRM delivers a tool to analyze customer data from the Operational Process; Analytical CRM helps companies create better relationships and experience with customers. Collaborative CRM deal with interaction with other organization and the customer. A good CRM should provide a few functions such as:

• Identify and capture customers’ needs, motivations, and behaviors throughout the relationship.
• Help your customers have positive experiences with your relationship to improve it over time.
• Integrate marketing, sales, and customer support activities, measuring and evaluating the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing.

CRM have a few processes, such as CRM Delivery Process, CRM Support Process, and CRM Analysis Process. There are a few things inside CRM Delivery Process. The first thing is Campaign Management, which helps the company to generate “leads” for potential client/customers. Sales Management allows the company to convert the leads from the Campaign Management into potential customers. Service Management helps the company to provide ongoing support for all the clients/customers to assist in the operation/purchasing of products. Complaint Management helps improve customer satisfaction by directly addressing their complaints to the company. This will help increase customer satisfaction while purchasing/buying products with this company. Inside CRM Support Management,

there is market research that allows the company to get data to help with their business process, and loyalty management enables the company to optimize the duration and intensity of relationships with the customer. For the CRM Analysis Process, lead management focuses on organizing and prioritizing contacts with prospective customers. Inside CRM Analysis Process, there is also customer profiling that helps the company focus on their customer behaviors that allow categorization of the customer. The last is feedback management consolidates, analyzes, and shares the customer information collected by the CRM.

A good CRM must have several components: Market Research, Sales Force Automation (SFA), Customer Service Support, Data Mining, and Analytics. The two primary keys for Market Research, such as Campaign Management, help the company support a few things like marketing budget, ad placement, sales targeting, and responses management. Meanwhile, Market Analysis provides a tool to analyze the market and the customer. Sales Force Automation (SFA) offers basic functionality for sales personnel to automate sales lead distribution and tracking. Customer Service Support includes

• help desk ticket management software,
• email, and
• other interaction tools connected to a customer database.

Database Mining and Analytics help companies collect customer data and analyze it to help the company with their marketing and advertisement.

Companies can choose what CRM is suitable for their company by selecting a vendor with a feature they require to help their business process. There are a few CRM Vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, etc. CRM is divided into three categories: Large Enterprise, Midsize, and Small businesses. Large Enterprise company they can choose between Oracle, Salesforce, NetSuite CRM, and many more. For Midsize, companies can choose between Pipedrive, SugarCRM, Monday Sales CRM, and many more. The Small Business company can choose between Vtiger, Zoho CRM, Freshworks CRM, and many more. There is also an On-Demand CRM, which means a company that provides a scalable CRM application using a browser, and the fee is paid per month and user.

When a company uses CRM System, some architecture is needed so that the CRM System can work adequately, such as an Application Server, Database Server, and Web Server. The application server runs at the front-end to process data or query data later; the data collected from the server go to the Database Server. The Database Server is the house for the back-end databases, and also it retrieves data from the system and collects it, and the data can be presented at the Application Server. Web Server CRM is used if an external user wants an access point, such as Vendors or Customers / Clients.

References:

PPT NEWBINUSMAYA SESSION 17-18

financesonline.com/5-crm-business-solutions-built-for-large-enterprises/

project-management.com/mid-market-crm/

zapier.com/blog/best-crms-for-small-business/