A great deal of data is being generated in the course of interactions with prospective and existing customers. Properly analyzed, the data can identify leads, product opportunities, customer segments and market trends, for example. Such analysis can also support the selling process by tracking responses and alerting salespersons. CRM software seeks to store and analyze the vast quantities of data.
Customer Relations Management
In simple terms, CRM involves organizing and tracking all contacts with prospective and existing customers and in a simple scenario, it involves:
- Recording all customer and interactions details in an organized manner into a database
- Providing the tools to view selected customer or prospect data in a desired manner
- Generating alerts for pending actions such as follow ups, service calls and marketing contacts
In a more complex large enterprise scenario, CRM can become a complicated exercise including:
- Marketing: Modules for Customer segmentation, List management, Campaign management, Lead management, Loyalty management and other marketing tasks
- Sales: Modules for Sales forecasting, Sales performance management, Territory management, Quotation & Order management, Pricing & Contracts, Commission management and other selling routines
- Service: Installations & Maintenance, Customer service and support, Field service management, Warranty & Claims and other service management modules
The system would be flexible to handle on-line and off-line interactions and attend to different functions like managing channel partnerships.
Modern ERP systems typically include customer relationship management software module to handle the tasks outlined above.
Goals of CRM
The major focus of CRM is to facilitate customer-centric operations leading to strong customer relations and loyalty. CRM seeks to do these through improved:
- Customer Experience Management: Even if customers have to deal with different persons and offices of an enterprise, they will receive a meaningful, helpful and consistent experience. CRM enables this by maintaining easily-retrievable customer records from anywhere across the enterprise. The records will show customer purchase history, contact details and pending actions, for example
- Sales force Automation: Sales people are supported through automated alerts about pending actions, customer issues and possible leads
- Customer Service: Customer call centers and Web-based help desk facilities can lead to quicker and more satisfactory customer service
- Channel Partners Management: Trade channel partners also need organized attention and excellent support to improve their performance
Higher revenue, increased customer retention, and satisfied customers and channel partners are the outcomes that these measures seek to achieve.
Customer relationship management or CRM seeks to enhance an enterprise's marketing effectiveness by providing superb customer experiences and supporting sales force and channel partners in different ways. CRM software can analyze vast quantities of data to identify different customer segments and most profitable customers. It can also generate timely and high quality decision support information at different organizational levels.
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