Customer Relationship Management
Firms are continually seeking new ways to fashion closer relationships with valuable customers in the belief that loyal customers are the source of most of their profits. With recent advances in customer relationship management (CRM), such firms have not only the motivation but also the means to create these closer relationships and deliver much more value to their customers. Yet experience shows that not all CRM solutions will be able to provide the correct level of service.
The shortcomings of CRM have been blamed both on software vendors for promising off the-shelf solutions that don’t meet expectations and on firms for underestimating implementation problems and their lack of ability at monitoring or supplying the proper maintenance required.
Another ingredient of customer relationship management is traceable, timely and comprehensive information, obtained through an on-going dialogue with each customer. Successful CRM depends on how well the firm extracts and manages the sharing of this information, and then converts it into knowledge that can be used to change how the organization collectively behaves toward the customer. The capability to manage such information is, in principle, facilitated by the availability of data-base management tools, customer information systems, and sales automation software that have come to be identified with CRM in all too many applications. The intent is to better organize customer-relevant data so sales staff can close deals faster, customer service can be streamlined, and communications can be personalized.
