The History of Crm - Moving Beyond The Customer Database

In 21st century, maintaining good relationship with the customer is the major management challenges in every business. In the past customer were not having alternative suppliers and they were not so demanding. But in today’s world it is complete transformation. All these problems and changes in business environments like increasing competition, economic liberalization, demanding customer, high consumer choice more focusing in value and quality of product or services purchased.

Modern marketing is more than developing product, pricing it, promoting it and making it accessible to target customer. Today producer shift to modern marketing from traditional marketing because of all these changes. The process of developing a cooperative and collaborative relationship between the buyer and seller is called customer relationship management (CRM).

The CRM is a new technique in marketing where the marketer tries to develop long term relationship with the customers to develop them as life time customers. CRM aims to make the customer climb up the ladder of loyalty. The company first tries to determine who are likely prospects i.e. the people who have a strong potential interest in the product and ability to pay for it. The company hopes to convert many of its qualified prospect into first time customers and then to convert those first time customers into repeat customers. Then the company tries to convert these repeat customers into clients – they are those people who buy only from the company in the relevant product categories. The next challenge for the company is to convert this client into advocates. Advocates are those clients who praise the company and encourage others to buy from it.

The ultimate challenge is to convert these advocates into partners where the customers and the clients work actively together to discover ways of getting mutual benefit. Thus in CRM the key performance figure is not just current market share but share of life time value by converting customers into partners. In CRM the company tries to identify that small percentage (20%) of key account holders whose contribution to the company revenues is high (80%). So from this point of view, CRM is also known as KEY ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT.Why – Customer Relationship ManagementCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of keeping track and analyse all of the interactions you have with your customers and prospects. CRM software is a tool that centralizes, simplifies, secures, and scales our customer engagement.

Growing BusinessProspecting is a collection of manual and automated activities across multiple channels which result in a lead or opportunity. You may use CRM to direct salespeople to cross-selling to up-selling activities, indentify new product or market opportunities, increase to-of-funnel opportunity creation, assign leads to reps to catch customer.Increasingly, successful companies have turned to inbound marketing, which is the use of your website and search optimization combined with a content curriculum to nurture customers from suspects to qualified prospects.Replicating Best PracticesYou will undoubtedly have some ideas about how you want to engage your customers. You will probably want to ensure that you are delivering a consistent high-quality customer experience.

CRM systems can be used to embed your best sales or customer service processes that will guide your people through every customer interaction. Templates can be created and used to guide your people through complex processes. Workflow automation can be used to automate activities to ensure best practices are followed while reducing the administrative overhead of managing the CRM.