Chapter 11 – Building a Customer-Centric Organization – Customer Relationship Management

CRM is a means of managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability. 

The role of CRM in supporting business operations are:allows an organization to gain insights into customers' shopping and buying behaviors.

• A CRM system consists of a historical view and analysis of all the acquired or to be acquired customers. This helps in reduced searching and correlating customers and to foresee customer needs effectively and increase business.
• CRM contains each and every bit of details of a customer, hence it is very easy for track a customer accordingly and can be used to determine which customer can be profitable and which not.
• In CRM system, customers are grouped according to different aspects according to the type of business they do or according to physical location and are allocated to different customer managers often called as account managers. This helps in focusing and concentrating on each and every customer separately.
• A CRM system is not only used to deal with the existing customers but is also useful in acquiring new customers. The process first starts with identifying a customer and maintaining all the corresponding details into the CRM system which is also called an ‘Opportunity of Business’. The Sales and Field representatives then try getting business out of these customers by sophistical following up with them and converting them into a winning deal. All this is very easily and efficiently done by an integrated CRM system.
• The strongest aspect of Customer Relationship Management is that it is very cost-effective. The advantage of decently implemented CRM system is that there is very less need of paper and manual work which requires lesser staff to manage and lesser resources to deal with. The technologies used in implementing a CRM system are also very cheap and smooth as compared to the traditional way of business.
• All the details in CRM system is kept centralized which is available anytime on fingertips. This reduces the process time and increases productivity.
• Efficiently dealing with all the customers and providing them what they actually need increases the customer satisfaction. This increases the chance of getting more business which ultimately enhances turnover and profit.
• If the customer is satisfied they will always be loyal to you and will remain in business forever resulting in increasing customer base and ultimately enhancing net growth of business.

Operational CRM	Analytical CRM
·         Deal directly with the customers	·         Do not deal directly with customers
·         Supports back-office operations	·         Supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations
·         Example: Campaign management, e-marketing, telemarketing and e-selling.	·         Example: Develop customer profiles and analyze customer or product profitability.

USING ANALYTICAL CRM TO ENHANCE DECISION 

Ø  Operational CRM – supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers

Ø  Analytical CRM – supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all system that do not deal directly with the customers

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SUCCESS FACTORS

CRM success factors include;

Ø  Clearly communicate the CRM strategy

Ø  Define information needs and flows

Ø  Build an integrated view of the customer

Ø  Implement in iterations

Ø  Scalability for organizational growth

USING ANALYTICAL CRM TO ENHANCE DECISION

Operational CRM and analytical CRM