CRM - Introduction

Customer Relationship Management is an information technology industry term for methodologies, strategies, software, and other web-based capabilities that help an enterprise organize and manage customer relationships. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy to select and manage the most valuable customer relationships. CRM requires a customer-centric business philosophy and culture to support effective marketing, sales, and service processes. 

CRM is more than a suite of products. It is the business philosophy that touches upon many independent parts of the organization. Industry analysts such as Gartner Group explain that top executives within the organization must lead this new business strategy. Management must endorse this cross-departmental philosophy, since technology alone is clearly insufficient. CRM requires enterprise-wide coordination, communication, and commitment. Successful CRM requires a new business strategy where the enterprise’s policies and processes are applied to the enabling technologies. 

Why CRM?

Industries realized that just the customer satisfaction alone can not feed their business and its the customer delight that keeps the customer coming back to do business and thus increasing the life-time of each customer is more important. Several companies are turning to customer-relationship management systems and strategies to gain a better understanding of their customer's wants and needs. Used in association with data warehousing, data mining, call centers and other intelligence-based applications, CRM "allows companies to gather and access information about customers' buying histories, preferences, complaints, and other data so they can better anticipate what customers will want. The goal is to instill greater customer loyalty.

Other benefits include:

• Faster response to customer inquiries
• Increased efficiency through automation
• Deeper understanding of customers
• Increased marketing and selling opportunities
• Identifying the most profitable customers
• Receiving customer feedback that leads to new and improved products or services
• Obtaining information that can be shared with business partners.

 Call Center : A call center is a central place where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an organization, usually with some amount of computer automation for recording, tracking and reporting purposes. 

 Data Warehousing : Data Warehousing is the process of managing data situated after and outside the operational systems in a structured manner.

 Data Mining : Data mining is the process of automating the detection of patterns in the central data warehouse and helps marketing professionals improve their understanding of customer behavior, and then predict behavior.