Information about Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.

Aspects

There are three aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:

• Operational - automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative
• Collaborative - direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative (self service)
• Analytical - analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes

META Group (acquired by Gartner in April 2005) developed this conceptual architecture in the late 1990s, and dubbed it the CRM Ecosystem.

Operational

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company over time without having to describe the history of their interaction each time.

Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call center agents.

Collaborative

Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone (Automated Voice Response AVR) or SMS.

The objectives of collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements.

Analytical

Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:

• Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimise marketing effectiveness
• Design and execution of specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, retention
• Analysis of customer behavior to aid product and service decision making (e.g. pricing, new product development etc.)
• Management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis
• Prediction of the probability of customer defection (churn).

Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics.

Strategy

Several commercial CRM software packages are available which vary in their approach to CRM. However, CRM is not just a technology, but rather a comprehensive approach to an organization's philosophy in dealing with its customers. This includes policies and processes, front-of-house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management. Hence, it is important that any CRM implementation considerations stretch beyond technology, towards the broader organizational requirements.

The objectives of a CRM strategy must consider a company’s specific situation and its customers needs and expectations.

Technology considerations

The technology requirements of a CRM strategy can be complex and far reaching.

The basic building blocks:

• A database to store customer information. This can be a CRM specific database or an enterprise data warehouse.
• Operational CRM requires customer agent support software.
• Collaborative CRM requires customer interaction systems, e.g. an interactive website, automated phone systems etc.
• Analytical CRM requires statistical analysis software as well as software that manages any specific marketing campaigns.

Each of these can be implemented in a basic manner or in a high end complex installation.

Key functionalities

A typical CRM system is subdivided into three basic sub modules:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Service

Marketing

Marketing sub module primarily deals with providing functionalities of Long-term planning and Short-term execution of Marketing related Activities within an organization.

Planning

Long-term Market Plans can be made and Quantitative as well as Qualitative measures (targets) can be set for a defined period and for different product groups, geographies etc. These are then monitored based on the actual performance throughout the defined period.

Campaign management

Short-Term execution includes running Marketing campaigns via different communication channels targeting a predefined group of potential buyers with a specific message referring to a product or a group of products.

Lead management

One key objective of the Marketing function is to generate sales related leads, which finally get converted into Sales Revenues for the company. Marketing campaigns with the specific objective of generating leads (Prospective customers who may be interested in a product). Lead management deals with processing these Leads, carrying out a sanity check, evaluating the genuineness of the information (Since, there is a lot of information that is gathered during Marketing Campaigns it becomes necessary to screen these leads), and finally converting them to Hot Leads or Cold Leads.

Sales

Sales functionalities are focused on helping the Sales team to execute and manage the presales process better and in an organized manner. Sales team is responsible for regularly capturing key customer interactions, any leads or opportunities they are working on etc, in CRM system. The system helps by processing this data, monitoring against the targets and proactively alerting the sales person with recommended further actions based on company's sales policy.

Opportunity management

Opportunities help the sales team by organizing all the relevant data regarding a prospective deal into one place. It is characterized by the details such as Prospective customer, expected budget, total spending, products interested in, expected closing date, key players in the deal and their key characteristics, important dates and milestones, etc.

The opportunity has several phases, e.g. initiation, identification, qualification, RFP received, quotation sent, final stage, won or lost. Of course these phases can be defined based on individual company needs.

A CRM system helps in each phase by "guiding" the sales representative to carry out certain suggested activities as defined by the company's sales policy. It creates reminders and planned activities within the system. For example, if the opportunity has reached "RFP received" stage, and the deal size is more than, say, US$50,000, the system can prompt the representative to hold a review discussion with a senior manager. This is often referred as Guided Sales Methodology.

Opportunities can be directly converted into quotations or sales orders.

Quotation and sales order management

Opportunities, if they reach a quotation phase, can be converted to a quotation, and, if won gets converted to a Sales order. Standard features of creating a "linked" Quotation or sales order from opportunities are provided. These Sales orders then flow to the Back-End (ERP) system for further execution and Delivery.

Activity management

Activities represent various Sales or Service related interactions with the customer (meetings, discussions, telephone calls, emails). Activity management provides a platform to consolidate all the interactions with customer into a single platform, helping to build a 360 degree view of customer.

Activities can be synchronized to Microsoft Outlook/Lotus Notes Calendar items (Meetings and Tasks).

Service

Service related functionalities are focused on effectively managing the customer service (Planned or Unplanned), avoid "leakage" of Warranty based services, avoid "Penalties" arising due to Non conformity of SLA (Service Level Agreements), and provide first and Second Level support to Customers.

Several functionalities are:

1. Service Order Management
2. Service Contract Management
3. Planned Services management
4. Warranty Management
5. Installed Base (Equipment) Management
6. SLA Management
7. Resource Planning and Scheduling
8. Knowledge Management (FAQs, How to guides)
9. Call Center Support
10. Resource Planning and Workforce Management

Channels of communication

It is also important to mention here that a CRM system is capable of executing all the three sub modules via multiple communication Channels. These channels can be:

1. Direct
2. Online (Internet)
3. Call Center (via Phone/FAX/Email etc)

All the three CRM Sub Modules (Marketing, Sales and Service) can be executed across these Communication channels. Based on these criteria, CRM offerings can be further sub divided into following:

Communication Channel / CRM Module	Direct	Internet	Call Center
Marketing	Online Marketing	Web Marketing	Tele Marketing
Sales	Web Shop	Tele Sales
Service	Online Service	Customer Self Service Portal	Tele Service

Successes

While there are numerous reports of "failed" implementations of various types of CRM projects, these are often the result of unrealistic high expectations and exaggerated claims by CRM vendors.

Privacy and data security

The data gathered as part of CRM must consider customer privacy and data security. Customers want the assurance that their data is not shared with third parties without their consent and not accessed illegally by third parties.

Customers also want their data used by companies to provide a benefit for them. For instance, an increase in unsolicited telemarketing calls is generally resented by customers while a small number of relevant offers is generally appreciated by customers.

Market structure

Given below is a list of top CRM software vendors in 2005 with figures in millions of United States Dollars published in a Gartner study.^[1]

Vendor	Global Revenue (US$)
SAP	1,475
Siebel	966
Oracle	368
Salesforce.com	281
Amdocs	276
Others	2,333
Total	5,698

See also

• Enterprise relationship management (ERM), method beyond CRM
• Business intelligence
• Customers
• Customer Intelligence
• Customer service
• Database marketing
• Mystery shopping
• Predictive analytics
• Sales force management system
• Web management system

References