CRM - Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM (customer relationship management)? CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, an enterprise might build adatabase about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail so that management, salespeople, people providing service, and perhaps the customer directly could access information, match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, know what other products a customer had purchased, and so forth. Ask your CRM questions at ITKnowledgeExchange.com According to one industry view, CRM consists of:

Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team.

Assisting the organization to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing processes (for example, taking orders using mobile devices)

Allowing the formation of individualized relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits; identifying the most profitable customers and providing them the highest level of service.

Providing employees with the information and processes necessary to know their customers, understand and identify customer needs and effectively build relationships between the company, its customer base, and distribution partners.

Many organizations turn to CRM software to help them manage their customer relationships. CRM technology is offered on-premise, on-demand or through Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM, depending on the vendor. Recently, mobile CRM and the open source CRM software model have also become more popular.
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CRM is the abbreviation for customer relationship management. CRM entails all aspects of interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related. CRM is often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to: Understand the customer Retain customers through better customer experience Attract new customer Win new clients and contracts Increase profitably Decrease customer management costs

While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship, however CRM systems are used in the same way to manage business contacts, clients, contract wins and sales leads.

CRM solutions provide you with the customer business data to help you provide services or products that your customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and understand who the customer is. Technology and the Web has changed the way companies approach CRM strategies because advances in technology have also changed consumer buying behavior and offers new ways for companies to communicate with customers and collect data about them. With each new advance in technology -- especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Web and smartphones -- customer relationships is being managed electronically. Many aspects of CRM relies heavily on technology; however the strategies and processes of a good CRM system will collect, manage and link information about the customer with the goal of letting you market and sell services effectively. Organizations frequently looking for ways to personalize online experiences (a process also referred to as mass customization) through tools such as help-desk software, e-mail organizers and different types of enterprise applications.

Role of CRM in Improving your Business All businesses are there to support its clients for it to achieve success. The focus of all the companies should be on their clients. In order to know the customer preferences, you will have to collect, group and analyze customer details, a tool that aids you in doing all these process is
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called as CRM Tool (Customer Relationship Management Tool). By knowing the likings and disliking of your customer will help you build a strong bond with existing clients and also to attract many more new clients. This strategy not only applies to conventional multinational companies even to small businesses that entail dealing directly with clients like cleaning franchises.

The customer data and information will be stored in a central site, and with the help of CRM tools you can access these details, manipulate them and make your decision from anyplace in the world at all times. The customer targeted scheme will help companies build a strong link with their customers and thus increasing its stronghold with its customer, giving a profitable Return of Investments thru the business. Managing different types are business activates are made easy because of these CRM tools.

Billing and Expense Sales and Marketing Human Resources Project Management

Features of CRM Customer Relationship Management has 3 key features, namely,

Operational CRM Collaborative CRM Analytical CRM.

Collaborative CRM - Having a direct communication with the clients without any interference from service or sales representatives. Analytical CRM - Investigating Customer Data with a huge volume of functions and reasons, as a perspective. Operational CRM - Offering full front end support for marketing, sales and other related service. Social CRM Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. As an emerging
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discipline, interpretations of Social CRM vary, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Paul Greenberg:[1] Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It's the company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation. Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly. However, this is too narrow an interpretation, as Social CRM also includes customer communities managed by the organisation themselves. Applications of Social CRM Social CRM has applications in marketing, customer service and sales, including:

peer-to-peer customer support idea management market research product launch brand reputation management

Relationship Marketing Relationship marketing is not about having a "buddy-buddy" relationship with your customers. Customers do not want that. Relationship Marketing uses the event-driven tactics of customer retention marketing, but treats marketing as a process over timerather than single unconnected events. By molding the marketing message and tactics to the LifeCycle of the customer, the Relationship Marketing approach achieves very high customer satisfaction and is highly profitable.

The relationship marketing process is usually defined as a series of stages, and there are many different names given to these stages, depending on the marketing perspective and the type of business. For example, working from the relationship beginning to the end: Interaction > Communication > Valuation > Termination Awareness > Comparison > Transaction > Reinforcement > Advocacy Suspect > Prospect > Customer > Partner > Advocate > Former Customer Using the relationship marketing approach, you customize programs for individual consumer groups and the stage of the process they are going through as opposed to some forms of database marketing where everybody would get virtually the same promotions, with perhaps a change in offer. The stage in the customer LifeCycle determines the marketing approach used with the customer. Relationship marketing is a strategy designed to foster customer loyalty, interaction and longterm engagement. This customer relationship management (CRM) approach focuses more on customer retention than customer acquisition. Relationship marketing is designed to develop strong connections with customers by providing them with information directly suited to their needs and interests and by promoting open communication. This approach often results in increased word-of-mouth activity, repeat business and a willingness on the customers part to provide information to the organization.

Relationship marketing contrasts with transactional marketing, an approach that focuses on increasing the number of individual sales. Most organizations combine elements of both relationship and transaction marketing strategies.

Relationship marketing is a process of improving the relationships with current customers rather than focusing on acquisition of new customers. This concept has been emerged since 1980s worldwide. The main goal of relationship marketing is to build and nurture a fixed set of customers who in turn will bring greater profits to the organization.
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Research findings:

Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers It costs six times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer Studies in several industries have shown that the cost of retaining an existing customer is only about 10% of the cost of acquiring a new customer so it can often make economic sense to pay more attention to existing customers

5% improvement in customer retention will lead to a profitability increase of the firm between 25% and 85% depending on the industry Business model Relationship marketing The model represents the level of customer loyalty according to the customer types. It comprises of different rungs in the relationship ladder of customer loyalty like:

Prospect Customer Client Supporter Advocate Partner The first rung of a ladder is a prospect who have not made a sale but likely to make a sale in the future and being followed by the successive rungs of customer, client, supporter, advocate and partner. prospect Customer Client Supporter Advocate Partner The main motto of the relationship marketing is to help the customers to move up the ladder in terms of providing them with more personalized service which exceeds the customer expectations. Relationship marketing approach There are two main effective approaches to relationship marketing namely

Customer retention Referral business Customer retention

It is the most cost effective and profitable way to retain the existing customers in todays competitive business world because 80% of the firms sales will only come from 20% of its customer databases. There are customized approaches to design customer retention programs keeping in mind the needs of the customers who in turn will perceive values been associated to the campaign. There are few customer retention techniques such as

Membership cards that enable the customers to avail special offers, discounts and gift vouchers Customer satisfaction surveys Customer grievance cell Designing welcome, acknowledgement, thanks giving, birthday and anniversary letters during these special occasions

Event management Customer delight Referral Business It is a term used to acquire a prospect from the current customers to make a sale or purchase a product that involves an incentive program for those who give referrals. It really increases our sales revenue. According to world-renowned sales trainer, Tom Hopkins, in "Sales Prospecting for Dummies"; your closing ratio for non-qualified leads is 10 percent versus a 60 percent close ratio with referred leads. Referral business building model

Target Lead Time Costomers Selection Support Activity Rewards Program Closing Referral Benefits: The referral business will result in following benefits:

It will reduce sales cycle and sales expenses due to focusing on the current customers rather than looking for cold prospects

It results in building the network of satisfied and delighted customers The satisfied customers will bring further more new customers to the company It increases the sales revenue