Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology for managing company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. CRM used for improving business relationships to grow  the business, a CRM system helps companies to stay connected to customers, streamline process, and improve profitability. 

A good CRM implementation must involve people, process, and systems, rather than just a narrowly, defined IT application. CRM will provides support for front-end customers facing functionality, which is usually not available in the traditional ERP systems. 

There are several types of CRM : 

• Operational CRM 

Provide front- and back- end support for sales and marketing, administrative personnel, or customer-service processes 

• Analytical CRM 

Provide tools for collection and analysis of data gathered during the operational process to help create a better relationship and experience with client or end-users 

• Collaborative CRM 

Deal with the interaction points between the organization and customer. 

Customer Relationship Processes 

• A good CRM should provide support for the following functions :  

• Capture and maintain customer needs, motivations, and behaviours over the lifetime of the relationship. 
• Facilitate the use of customer experiences for continuous improvement of this relationship. 
• Integrate marketing, sales, and customer support activities measuring and evaluating the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing. 

CRM Delivery Processes 

• Campaign Management 

• To generate “leads” or potential clients for the organization. 

• Sales Management 

• To convert the lead generated by campaign management into potential customer. 

• Service Management 

• Provide ongoing support for the client and to assist in the operation of the product or service purchase. 

• Complaint Management 

• To improve customer satisfaction by directly addressing the complaint of the customer and supporting a continuous improvement process. 

CRM Support Process 

• Market Research 

• Focuses on systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data on findings relevant to specific sales activity in an organization. 
• Involves integration of external and internal data from a wide variety of sources. 

• Loyalty Management 

• Provides the processes to optimize the duration and intensity of relationships with customers. 

CRM Analysis Processes 

• Lead Management 

• Focus is on organizing and prioritizing contacts with the prospective customers. 

• Customer Profiling 

• Focus is to develop a marketing profile of evert customer by observing his or her buying patterns, demographics, buying and communication preferences, and other information that allows categorization of the customer. 

• Feedback management 

• Consolidates, analyses, and shares the customer information collected by CRM delivery and support processes with the analysis process and vice versa. 

CRM Technology 

• CRM technology implements a companywide business strategy in an effort to reduce costs and enhance service by solidifying customer loyalty. 
• With the rise of the Internet, data mining and analytics techniques have advanced to where they can be considered an integral component of CRM. 
• True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. 

CRM Components 

• Market Research 
• Sales Force Automation 
• Customer Service Support 
• Data mining and Analytics 

CRM Life Cycle 

A CRM system life cycle involves focus on people, procedures, company philosophy, and culture, rather than just information technology. Adequately outline the corporate CRM goals and the practical process changes that have to occur before focusing on possible technology solutions. Functional requirements must be considered before making a decision on the architecture. 

Reference: https://www.salesforce.com/crm/what-is-crm/