CRM-Customer Relationship Management

After recession Market condition is improving. For growing up in the business in the highly competitive environment, your success depends upon how you can find new clients, win new clients, nurture and retain the existing once, lure the former clients back to the company, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer support. This is where concept of Customer Relationship Management comes into the picture.

Customer Relationship Management, famously known as CRM, is simply a methodology/concept to keep customers happy and satisfied.

In three phases CRM can support the relationship between organisation and customer.

1. Acquire: Acquire new customers by marketing and selling products to customer

2. Enhance: Provide various tools which offers the customers service from a team of sales and service specialists, which offers customers the convenience of one-stop shopping

3. Retain: Retain the customers by letting them know about new products, with better services and rewarding the loyal customers by creating different type of market strategies.

We can see lots of example related to CRM in our day to day life. Some are as below:

1. To acquire the customers one new company announced 1 paisa per second plan.

2. Companies provide team of sales and service specialist to suggest the new plans to customer suitable to their needs and help them choosing the right product. Through their service specialist, they also solve the issues faced by customers while using their products. Some ompanies even provide web based tools so that you can recharge your prepaid mobile account, pay your bills, lodge your comaplaints, check you bill details etc at one stop.

3. Retain: Companies provide various promotional offers to their loyal customers and make their market strategies, try to maintain their relationships with them by providing better and improved services.

Broadly speaking, there are three types of CRM:

1. Operational CRM: It provides support to front office business operations like sales, support, marketing. Tasks resulting from these processes are forwarded to employees responsible for them, as well as the information necessary for carrying out the tasks and interfaces to back-end applications are being provided and activities with customers are being documented for further reference.

2. Analytics CRM: Data gathered in operational CRM is analyzed and help the organization to plan and make their future strategy. Data collection and analysis is viewed as a continuing and iterative process. Ideally, business decisions are changing over period of time, based on feedback from earlier analysis and decisions.

3. Collaborative CRM: Collaborative CRM facilitates interactions with customers through all channels (personal, letter, fax, phone, web, e-mail) and supports co-ordination of employee teams and channels. It is a solution that brings people, processes and data together so companies can better serve and retain their customers. The data/activities can be structured, unstructured, conversational, and/or transactional in nature.

I will discuss these in more detail in my next blogs...