Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management is a corporate level strategy which focuses on creating and maintaining lasting relationships with its customers. Although there are several commercial CRM software packages on the market which support CRM strategy, it is not a technology itself. Rather, a holistic change in an organisation's philosophy which places emphasis on the customer.
A successful CRM strategy cannot be implemented by simply installing and integrating a software package and will not happen over night. Changes must occur at all levels including policies and processes, front of house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management; all aspects of the business must be reshaped to be customer driven.
To be effective, the CRM process needs to be integrated end-to-end across marketing, sales, and customer service. A good CRM program needs to:
- Identify customer success factors
- Create a customer-based culture
- Adopt customer-based measures
- Develop an end-to-end process to serve customers
- Recommend what questions to ask to help a customer solve a problem
- Recommend what to tell a customer with a complaint about a purchase
- Track all aspects of selling to customers and prospects as well as customer support.
When setting up a CRM segment for a company it might first want to identify what profile aspects it feels are relevant to its business, such as what information it needs to serve its customers, the customer's past financial history, the effects of the CRM segment and what information is not useful. Being able to eliminate unwanted information can be a large aspect of implementing CRM systems.
When designing a CRM's structure, a company may want to consider keeping more extensive information on their primary customers and keeping less extensive details on the low-margin clients. [ Wikipedia ]