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Customer Relationship Management is extremely important in today's business society, because it is so easy to shop around online and explore different competition in certain industries. The definition of Customer Relationship Management is a process that involves managing all aspects of a customer's relationship with an organization to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organization's profitability. Customer relationship management allows organizations to gain insights into customers' shopping and buying behaviors. Information technology effects operational customer relationship management, similarly to it effects many other aspects of business. Three things that information technology allows customer relationship management to do is to implement list generators, campaign management, and cross selling and up-selling. List generators compile customer's information from a variety of sources and segment the information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns. Campaign management systems guide users through marketing campaigns performing such tasks as campaign definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation, and success analysis. Cross selling involves selling additional products to a customer in order to increase the sale. Up-selling involves increasing the value of a sale. For example, you can cross sell by adding an accessory to an item, and you can up sell by making the quantity or size of the order larger. There are also many systems that deal with Customer Relationship Management. An example of this is the sales management CRM system, which automates each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives coordinate and organize all of their accounts. Another would be contact management CRM system which maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. This features things such as maintain organizational charts, detailed customer notes, and supplemental sales information. Another would be opportunity management CRM systems, which target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales. They help determine potential customers and competitors and define selling efforts including budgets and schedules. Call centers are also a form of customer relationship management. Call centers are where customer service representatives answer customer inquiries and respond to problems through a number of different customer touch points. A customer call center is one of the most important aspects of customer relationship management, as it helps maintain and gain happy customers. Similar to a call center, is a web-based self service system, which allows customers to use the web to find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. An example of this would be UPS or FedEx's ability to allow their customers to easily track their package as it travels through the country. Similar to web-based self service system is a click to talk button, which allows customers to instantly talk to representatives through the website, rather than having to call. Call scripting allows call service representatives to access organizational databases that track similar issues or questions and automatically generate the details that can be relayed to the customer needing assistance. John Stone recommends Managing Customer Relationships: A Strategic Framework , found here
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customer relationship management, customer management, client relationships, management, business ownership,
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