Customer Relationship Management

CRM Involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability.
CRM systems, sometimes called e-CRM systems, use technology to help an e-business manage its customer base. CRM allows an e-business to match customer needs with product plans and offerings, remind customers of service requirements, and determine what products a customer has purchased .

CRM s/w: 

• Salesforce
• SAP CRM- provides a central marketing platform that enables organizations to analyze, plan, develop, and execute all marketing activities through all customer interaction points Oracle,
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• IBM

}Operational CRM – Supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. Examples of such a process include mobile phones and cameras

}Analytical CRM – Supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers.  it is concerned with exploiting customer data to enhance both customer and company value. Analytical CRM builds on the foundation of customer information. Customer data may be found in enterprise-wide repositories: sales data (purchase history), financial data (payment history, credit score), marketing data (campaign response, loyalty scheme data), service data. To these internal data can be added data from external sources: geo-demographic and lifestyle data from business intelligence organizations, for example. With the application of data mining tools, the company can then interrogate these data. Intelligent interrogation provides answers to questions such as: Who are our most valuable customers? Which customers have the highest propensity to switch to competitors? Which customers would be most likely to respond to a particular offer?

Analytical CRM has become an essential part of effective CRM implementation. Operational CRM struggles to reach full effectiveness without analytical information on the value of customers. Customer value drives many operational CRM decisions, such as:

a) Which customers shall we target with this offer?
b) What is the relative priority of customers waiting on the line, and what level of service should be offered?
c) Where should I focus my sales effort?

From the customer's point of view, analytical CRM can deliver better, more timely, even personally customized, solutions to the customer's problems, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction. From the company's point of view, analytical CRM offers the prospect of more powerful cross-selling and up-selling programs, and more effective customer retention and customer acquisition programs. Retailer Wal-Mart uses analytical CRM. It collects data from its 1200 stores to identify which segments are shopping, what they are buying and which promotions are most effective. It constantly tries to improve average basket value through effective analytical CRM.

Sales Process