Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Essay Example

Introduction

Most contemporary organizations have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy. This strategy is utilized in incorporating a diversity of integration tools that facilitate organizations to put together a closer, and more beneficial relationship with their clientele. There are several CRM solutions which include marketing, sales, customer service, as well as support applications. These solutions facilitate providers in learning more from interactions with customers in an effort to target and capitalize on sales and marketing initiatives. CRM technologies are normally driven by business units in the organization. These technologies assist the organization in benefiting from improved access to customers as well as improved access to and insight, more valuable customer interactions, as well as integration throughout all customer channels and back-office organization functions. Eventually, the outcome is improved customer satisfaction in addition to optimized profitability (Anderson 2002).

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management can be described as a business philosophy. It describes a strategy that makes the customer the prime focus of an organization’s activities, processes as well as culture. Information Technology applications are the major tools which facilitate organizations in implementing this strategy (Jeffrey 2002). The foundation concept of CRM is comparatively simple. CRM endeavors to realize a ‘distinct integrated vision of customers’ and a customer-centric modus operandi. The customer is the sole source of the company’s current profit and projected growth. However, an ideal customer, who grants more profit with fewer resources, is always rare since customers are well-informed and the competition is aggressive. Information technologies may provide the skill to differentiate as well as manage customers. CRM can be viewed as a marketing approach that is focused on customer information.

The relationship between an organization and its clientele involves incessant bi-directional communication as well as interaction. The relationship may be long-term or short-term, discrete or continuous, and lastly one-time or repeating. Relationship may be behavioral or attitudinal. Although customers may have a positive attitude in regard to the organization and its products, their purchasing behavior is greatly situational (Jeffrey 2002). For example, the purchasing pattern for airline tickets is dependant upon whether a customer purchases the ticket for a business trip or a family vacation. CRM entails the management of such a relationship with the view of making it more valuable as well as mutually beneficial.

CRM entails incessant corporate change in processes and culture, thus it must be understood that CRM is not an activity confined in the organization’s marketing department. The customer data compiled is transformed into corporate data that subsequently leads to activities that exploit the data and market opportunities (Anderson 2002). Customer relation management is a strategic tool for retaining customers through a combination of efforts where customer’s disaffection with the company is reduced to the bare minimum. Virtually every major company especially those in the service industry have a customer relation management department with the sole aim of keeping the customer happy. The worker development should be implemented in an organization in order to create a well motivating and service oriented work environment which will facilitate delivery of effective and high quality client service. The empirical evidence emerging from various studies about the effectiveness of customer relation management strategies so far yielded mixed results that are inconclusive and contradictory(Anderson 2002).

Customer relation management is critical to an organizations triumph in the recent business environment. The clients expectations from an organization are many and their demand so empowered. Customer management has been embraced as a training requirement in an organization with sustainable competitive advantage. Most of the markets are flooded with product and service and thus an organization should aim at maintaining its customers through customer satisfaction. Customer relation management should be a leadership issue and incorporated as a business strategy and thus should start from the organizations leaders.  Customer satisfaction will rarely happen by chance and thus leaders should never leave it to chances (Anderson 2002).

Good Customer Relationship Management entails thoughtful customer relation management and customer experience design. The customers’ satisfaction and loyalty to an organization are directly related to the quality of Customer Relation management. The customer has to feel good and comfortable doing business with you. In order to survive in the highly competitive environment many companies are investing heavily in customer service training programs, customer relation management and call center relation management. This is aimed at sharpening the customer focus and build satisfaction and royalty. CRM is founded on three fundamental assumptions. These assumptions include: the customer desires a relationship with the organization that supplies or manufacturers the products or services that the customer consumes; CRM is a process or practice that all firms engage in or ought to engage in to some extent; that good CRM enhances the degree of emotional bonding between the supplier and the customer. These assumptions are however, subject to further research (Jeffrey 2002).

Customer relation management is one of the principles of total quality management. Customer management is about caring about customer needs. Looking into a customer needs is providing customers with the products and services that they require. Hence the aim of customer relation management is to respond to those needs in a proactive way by identifying the service needs, dealing with customer requests, taking action to avoid delays, and interpreting the organization procedures in responding to the customer’s needs, and this is what distinguishes successful organizations from the poor performing organizations. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broad term covering all concepts utilized by organizations to manage their interactions with clientele. This mainly includes the capture, storage and analysis of customer information. Individual clients create preference for their firms and enhance business outcomes over a lifetime of relationship with their clientele (Jeffrey 2002).

Works Cited

Anderson, K. & Carol K.  Customer Relationship Management. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.

Jeffrey.  P. CRM: Redefining Customer Relationship Management. Woburn. MA: Digital Press. 2002.