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Guest Post Customer Relationship Management or CRM is a strategy used to manage a company s i nteractions with its customers, consumers,

clients or potential sales targets. It is an approach which has evolved over time to incorporate technology as a key tool to organise and automate many business processes. These are generally focu sed on sales activities, but also encompass other critical business functions su ch as customer service, marketing and technical support. Though CRM can sometimes refer to an IT system which helps to manage these funct ions, in successful companies it is usually regarded as a company wide business strategy to maintain existing customers and successfully obtain new ones. In its essence, Customer Relationship Management helps businesses gain an insigh t into the behaviour of their customers and modify their business operations to ensure that customers are served in the best possible way. The way CRM has evolv ed (and in turn how CRM has allowed business to evolve) is to shift the focus fr om the business to the consumer. The traditional viewpoint in industry used to be here s what we can make how can we sell it? Now the fresher approach is: what exactly do our customers need and how can we fulfill that need? The ultimate goal of an effective CRM system is, howeve r, always to maximize profit. A number of types of CRM have evolved to deal with the complex workflows which e xist in all larger companies. Although these have distinct functions, they are o ften linked together in by one CRM package which allows all functions to be link ed together. More and more, this tends to be a web-based CRM solution. The advantages of web-based CRM is that they are real-time systems and can be ac cessed and amended simultaneously by different departments in different geograph ical locations. Some of the key functions typical to an effective CRM system are as follows: Marketing Customer data can be used to help target marketing drives, create different mate rial to capture different leads and assign the correct member of the sales team to follow up on that lead. Customer data usually begins with a record of all of the organisations or individuals the business deals with, arranged by category, or role. Customer activity such as emails, orders and invoices can all be linked to this. Sales CRM can provide a range of tools to a sales team, including Activity management, Opportunity tracking, Pricing and Forecasting. Sales success can be fully analy sed, allowing accurate sales forecasts and individual sales performances can als o be tracked. Order Fulfillment A CRM system can create, record and effectively manage order fulfillment data su ch as transaction documents, sales orders, invoices, purchase orders and credit notes. Customer Support CRM can improve the quality of service delivered to customers, by managing all t heir queries, complaints, feedback and testimonials in one place. In this respec t, CRM can be extremely helpful in identifying issues with products or services. Often, CRM includes a system to generate cases issues reported by the customer wh ich require an investigation to prevent reoccurrence.

The use of web-based CRM avoids using separate applications for every business f unction, each with their own bank of electronic records, folders and files. Instead, there are brought together, joining up data from previously disparate a reas like sales, marketing, technical support and customer relations, allowing a n accurate, consistent view of customers. As such, companies using an effective CRM system could be seen as having a significant competitive edge over rival com panies who don t.

Circle of change - CRM (1990 to 2010) Change is expensive, disruptive, and often unpredictable. In the previous articl e in this series, we related rapid advances in technology fuelling new businesse s and business processes and the consequent circle of change. The picture below depicts how managed CRM became feasible with the advent of Dat abase technologies in late 1980s. It helped automate management of several custo mer facing operations including support, sales, and marketing. Today CRM solutio ns are either delivered as a SAAS or are seamlessly integrated into enterprise a pplications using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The evolution of CRM busi ness processes followed ground breaking changes in database, networking and comp uting technologies. A snapshot of this relationship is evident in the picture be low. crm Some facts Vantive, Clarify, Scopus and Remedy were one of the first CRM product vendors in early-mid 1990s. Vantive was acquired by PeopleSoft, which in turn was subseque ntly acquired by Oracle. Scopus was acquired by Siebel, which was subsequently a cquired by Oracle. Clarify was acquired by Amdocs. I worked for the core engineering team at Clarify from 1996 to 2007. Oracle, SAP , Microsoft are now leading vendors of CRM products.

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