Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Hi everyone!

Today we will just briefly talk about Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Since the start of the 21st century, customer’s have become more demanding. No longer were customers traditional. They had moved forward, and grown to be more aware. With more businesses sprouting up and more competition, it is not a surprise that customers were becoming demanding.

Today, like in the past customers add value to an organization. You may ask “Why do they add value?”. Simply because customers represent your business and they represent the revenue flow into your organization. Certainly, this is necessary to ensure the growth of your organization.

Nowadays, customers are demanding in the sense that more and more customers require personalized services that looks into their well being. This includes improved services and personalization such as addressing customers issues, needs and improvising the business to match their needs.

Therefore, it is simple to say that in today’s business the relationship between the customers and the organization is the most relevant and of utmost importance to an organization. The growth, success and revenue of a company solely depends on its customers.

The only way to keep the current customers happy and prospective customers interested is to ensure you are able to secure your current customers by improving your relationship with them.

That is how CRM comes to play in an organization. It is the implementation of a system to help organizations evaluate divisions within their corporations, communicate with their customers better, serve their customers better and even to provide better services in the future.

In the current world, customers are changing - they are becoming much harder to retain as they expect much more from businesses that they contribute to.

More companies are focusing of strategies to ensure that they are not only able to retain their current customers but ensure that in the process they are able to nurture new customers.

All of this requires communication - a means or a way in which businesses can effectively communicate with their customers. This is how Customer Relationship Management is formed, as a method in which companies can successfully communicate with their customers in means and ways such as to understand their needs.

In fact, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an infrastructure that allows for the increase in customer value and to motivate these customers to remain loyal to the company.

CRM Systems today are formed with a myriad of functions and are capable or truly retaining customers in most cases and in worst cases, a failure of the entire system.

A standard CRM system consists of the “front end” or the Operational CRM which handles all the operations of the company (day-to-day) that is and a “back end” or the Analytical CRM which handles all the analytical and decision making for the company’s top executives.

A typical Operational CRM would consist of a Sales, Marketing and Customer Service system to allow for a seamless operation at the front end.

It would also consist of a data warehouse and a data mining system which can be integrated into a collaborative CRM system to provide a wide range of decision support systems.

These days, development of CRM systems requires thorough analysis and planning from the service providers to the intended companies.

Such is the importance of a CRM system to most businesses.

Operational CRM
In the most common CRM systems, you will notice that it is made up of three main components in the operational CRM:

* Sales System
* Marketing System
* Customer Service System

Sales System

The Sales system is perhaps one of the most important function in an organization’s CRM system. It should be able to handle all sales related issues or sales related sections that communicate with the customers.

Within the Sales System should be incorporated numerous functions that would be essential to an organization such as a Sales Handling System, Prospective Customers System, etc;

Marketing System

The marketing system is mainly used for the marketing needs of an organization, perfectly dealing with marketing campaigns of the company targeting various audiences as required or decided by the marketing team.

The marketing system also allows for a variety of marketing tools such as the ability to conduct marketing via the internet, ad campaigns, conventional methods such as brochures, banners, newspaper advertisements, radio advertisements, etc;

Customer Service System

Now this is the system that deals with your customers in regards to the issues they are facing such as technical issues, troubleshooting issues, feedback and comments.

This system would consist primarily of

* Call centres
* Call scripting systems
* Web based systems

The idea is to ensure that customers are able to reach the organization and communicate effectively with the relevant representatives of the organization in regards to their needs.

Therefore, for an instance a call centre can be utilized by the company 24 hours a day and 7 days a week to ensure that all customers are able to effectively reach the organization and its representatives.

Analytical CRM

In a common analytical CRM system you would notice the data warehouse and the data mining systems which can be integrated with a collaborative CRM system to be implemented within the systems of the front-end.

The analytical CRM system is like the engine or the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of an organization’s CRM system. It stores all the inputs from the operational CRM and stores it in data warehouses which is then accessed by the data mining systems to provide future predictions or show a series of repetitive patterns that have been related to the company.

Besides that, the analytical CRM system should also cater for analytical systems which would be able to analyze the various data within the data warehouse and provide the relevant analysis in regards to those systems which can be shared with the operational CRM systems using the collaborative CRM system.