Customer Relationship Management - The Why And The How

by Jeffery Nevil⁽¹³⁴⁾ Red Star

The importance of customers in any form of business is quite blatant. The relationship formed with a customer by a business is a very crucial, but also very fragile one. As such it requires an immense amount of maintenance and a strategic approach to ensure the proliferation of such relationships and manage a company's interaction with customers. The way in which a business implements such a strategic approach is customer relationship management, also known by the acronym CRM.

The chief goal of CRM is obviously to manage relationships, but this sort of strategic approach relies heavily on technology. Technology plays a key role, it is almost essential in order to organise information for example. This is invaluable to any form of customer relationship management; a general principle would be that sound organisation is an absolute imperative for sound management. Therefore a strong computerised organisation system is essential.

The automation of business processes is another aspect that is required in customer relationship management. With the advent of the internet, businesses have been able to expand their customer base and optimise their resources through technological means. The result of which is a relatively small number of people dealing with a very large amount of customers. The shear manpower required to maintain an efficient level of service is not present, therefore one clearly requires some form of automation. This allows for a streamlined system that reliably manages and meets customers' needs, thus promoting the relationship with the business. An example of a form of automation is marketing email. Customers can be targeted with marketing for very specific products that they have expressed some form of interest in, as well as new or improved services. There's a great value here for the business as it is allowed to cater to a customer as an individual. So better marketing is a clear advantage of CRM.

There is also a benefit to customer service and support. Specially designed software can allow a company to manage and maintain requests from clients, for example a properly designed infrastructure will allow a phone room to house various agents that are provided only with requests from customers that are specific to their own capabilities - in order to efficiently resolve any issues, and thus keep a customer satisfied.

Appointing times for delivery, meetings or any other sort of arranged interaction can be managed technologically too. Such a platform provides a range of times or places for the customer to choose from. In a business that requires some kind of delivery service that is time dependent, such as a pizza delivery company for example, a website or email system can provide an automated method of scheduling and confirming an appointed time of delivery.

There are many other methods of CRM; however it is all dependent on the needs of the business and the needs of the client base. Therefore in CRM construction, consideration should be taken in terms of the best points of emphasis. Broadly speaking, the benefits of constructing such a system are quality, efficiency, reduction of costs, customer satisfaction and ultimately increased profits.

Jeffrey Nevil writes on a number of subjects including CRM construction.

Article submitted Tuesday, January 24, 2012 & read 4 times.

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