Customer Relationship Management System

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT SYSTEM A. Customer Relationship Management In a small business operating in a small neighbourhood, business owners and managers can easily get to know their customers personally through face-to-face meetings. But in large businesses operating on a metropolitan, regional, national, or even global scale, it is impossible to get to know customers intimately. In such businesses, there are too many customers and too many different ways in which customers interact with the company (via the web, telephone, fax, and face-to-face). It is difficult to integrate information from all these sources and deal with a large number of customers. This is where customer relationship management comes in handy. Customer relationship management (CRM) takes and integrates customer data from across the organisation, consolidates, analyses, and distributes the results to various systems and customer touch points throughout the company. Touchpoints, also known as touchpoints, are methods of interaction with customers such as telephone, email, customer service, mail, websites, wireless devices or retail stores. A well-designed CRM system provides a company-wide view of the customer, which is useful for improving sales and customer service. Such a system also gives the customer a single view of the company regardless of the touch points the customer uses. A good CRM system provides data and analytical tools to answer questions such as "who are the most loyal customers?", "who are the most profitable customers?", "what do they want to buy?". Companies use the answers to these questions to acquire new customers, provide better service and support to existing customers, make their offerings more relevant to customer interests, and provide more value to retain profitable customers. This interactive session on technology describes how International House of Pancakes (IHOP) uses a customer relationship management system to learn more about its customers and improve its communication with them. IHOP uses Oracle Corporation Customers data hub to integrate customer data from various sources and Oracle Teleservice software to manage customer service-related telephone communications. B. Customer Relationship Management Software CRM software for commercial use ranges from minimal tools that can only perform limited functions, such as creating a personalised website for a specific customer, to large-scale enterprise applications that can perform extensive customer interactions, analyse with good reporting tools, and link to other large enterprise applications such as supply chain management and enterprise systems. More comprehensive CRM packages include modules for partner relationship management (PRM) and customer relationship management (ERM). PRM uses the same large data sets, tools, and systems as customer relationship management to improve collaboration between a company and its selling partners. If a company does not sell directly to its customers but does so through distributors or resellers, PRM organises this path of selling to customers directly. PRM provides the ability to exchange information and distribute data about customers to the company and its partners, integrating the functions of lead generation, pricing, promotion, order configuration and availability. It also provides tools to assess the performance of the company's partners to ensure that the best partners get the support needed to generate more business activity. ERM software deals with CRM-related employee issues, such as goal setting, employee performance management, performance-based compensation and employee training. Major CRM application software vendors include Siebel systems, clarify, and salesforce.com. Enterprise software vendors such as SAP and Oracle-PeopleSoft are also active in the field of customer relationship management and offer tools to integrate their enterprise system modules with customer relationship management modules. Customer relationship management systems typically provide software and tools for online sales, customer service and marketing. These capabilities are described below: a. Sales Force Automation (SFA) The sales force automation (SFA) module of a CRM system helps sales staff increase their productivity by focussing their sales efforts on the most profitable customers, i.e. the ones that are most likely to make the most money.