Tuesday, March 18, 2008

What is CRM

The fundamental aim of each business is to provide its customers the best services. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an approach to do simply the same.

There are various shards of software that exits & render customer relationship management aspects, however truth of Customer Relationship Management moves further than software implementation. It's a business approach to facilitate the use of many pieces of software, plus implementing policies that endorse (1) the gathering of customer news, and (2) the utilization of that information by persons all through the business in turn to enlarge customer service and raise trade. Thus, CRM is the strategic use of information, processes, technologies & people to manage the customer's relationship with the company across the whole customer life cycle. CRM provides a customer-centered view.


Through CRM definition we can develop a framework that covers all the functions & components needed to build CRM solution. Let’s have a look at the key elements of the definition:

  1. CRM focuses on strategic impact rather than operational impact. Benefits are generally long term than immediate.
  2. CRM is a total discipline: To understand CRM think of it as having the same components as any manufacturing business. It uses CRM technology & power (people) to turn raw material (customer information) into products (processes & interactions that build customer loyalty.
  3. CRM includes all the functions that directly touch the customer throughout his entire lifetime with your company. It touches multiple organizations & crosses boundaries. Functions usually included in CRM effort are marketing, sales, customer services & product support (whether internal or through a channel partner whether on or off the web).

The above elements of CRM help to build CRM software solution. It can also be said that customer relationship management structure is an endeavor structure, which indicates that it covers various divisions. Practically every part of a company has certain implicit contact to customers, or customer information; the aim of CRM is to gather that information in a main depository, examine it, and present it to all departments. Customer relationship management system is very intricate, containing many divisions of information and several shards of software, coupled in a specific interface which is difficult to arrange. A number of bigger companies employ an integrator to place the CRM system as one. Since intricacy of CRM is high, small companies view it as very costly. But, the nominal company can also employ a CRM approach. These companies manage CRM with a pack of index cards and a ball pen rather then spending huge some of money as spent by the large companies. Average companies might employ effortless software and yet have an extremely efficient CRM system that can assist them to offer customers the best services in their own way, and to gain the beneficial aid of information which has been gathered.