Customer Relationship Management – What is CRM ?

Every business unit emphasizes on spurting a long term relationship with customers to nurture its stability in today’s blooming market. Customer’s expectations are now not only limited to get best products and services, they also need a face-to-face business in which they want to receive exactly what they demand and in a quick time.

Customer Relationship Management is an upright concept or strategy to solidify relations with customers and at the same time reducing cost and enhancing productivity and profitability in business. An ideal CRM system is a centralized collection all data sources under an organization and provides an atomistic real time vision of customer information. A CRM system is vast and significant, but it be can implemented for small business, as well as large enterprises also as the main goal is to assist the customers efficiently.

Usually an organization consists of various departments which predominantly have access to customer’s information either directly or indirectly. A CRM system piles up this information centrally, examines it and then makes it addressable within all the departments.

Lets take an example of an international call center which uses a CRM tool called ‘XYZ’ and is integrated with a phone and a computer system or laptop. Now this system automatically perceives which customer is calling.

Before the executive attends the phone the CRM system brings forth the customer details on the computer or laptop screen and also indicates what the opportunity of deals is with that particular customer, what the customer had already purchased or ordered in past and what is the probability of buying in future. Not only this, it can also highlight what all products best suit this customer.

For finance department it may show the information regarding the current balance and for accounting department it may pop out the information regarding the recent purchases by the customer. All these pieces of data are stored in the CRM database and are available as and when it is needed.

According to this example, CRM system provides a well defined platform for all business units to interact with their clients and fulfill all their needs and demands very effectively and to build long-term relationship.

Wangling this kind of relationship with customers is not easy to manage and it depends on how the systematically and flexibly a CRM system is implemented or integrated. But once it’s accomplished it serves the best way in dealing with customers. In turn customers feels gratitude of self-satisfaction and loyalty which results in better bonding with supplier and hence increasing the business.

A CRM system is not only used to deal with the existing customers but is also useful in acquiring new customers. The process first starts with identifying a customer and maintaining all the corresponding details into the CRM system which is also called an ‘Opportunity of Business’. The Sales and Field representatives then try getting business out of these customers by sophistically following up with them and converting them into a winning deal.

Customer Relationship Management strategies have given a new outlook to all the suppliers and customers to keep the business going under an estimable relationship by fulfilling mutual needs of buying and selling.