Summary: Customer Relationship Management

Relationships are the essence of life companies cannot survive without relations with their customers. They are the invisible threads, which build a unique bond between individuals and organizations. Managing relationships is a very difficult and complex phenomenon. CRM originated in early 1970s when the business units had a manifestation that it would be advisable to become ‘customer emphatic’ rather that ‘product emphatic’. Birth of CRM was because of this heedful perceptiveness, organizations are realizing the importance of the vital role played by relationships in achieving and maintaining the cutting edge at the marketplace. Peter F. Drucker had advocated that the purpose of any business is to create customers. It is the customer, which

One of the first on the scene was Dr. Jagdish Sheth who was at the Goizeta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta. CRM: Customer relationship management as coined by the Gartner Group, it compasses sales, marketing, customer service, and support applications. While the CRM term is fairly recent, it grew from a combination of terms like Help Desk, Customer Support, ERP, and Data mining. It evolved because none of the previous terms could cover the topic well enough and because some of the terms (ERP) have grown to be met with a great deal of distaste in the mouths of the business world. CRM DEFINED: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the strategic application of people, processes, and technology in an organization-wide focus on improving the profitability of customer relationships - DM Martin and AM Peel, The Pace Setter Group, 2001 The infrastructure that enables the delineation of an increase in customer value, and the correct means to motivate valuable customers to remain loyal, to buy back again. - Jill Dyche, The CRM Handbook, 2000 CRM (Customer Relationship Management): strategy (technology-enabled) in response to, and in anticipation of, actual customer

It determined that customer retention is the key to increasing profits of a company. The article continued by stating that quality customer support is one of five primary determinants of loyalty. The number one reason why customers defect is the perception of poor service .Customer Relationship Management is , however, even broader in scope than improving customer service: CRM is also about increasing revenue. In years past, businesses were scrambling to implement costly Enterprise Resource Planning solutions (ERP), which were mainly about the bottom line, cutting costs by improving the flow of data and interaction between business and customer. But understanding how technology can increase revenues through better customer interaction is far more difficult .The right CRM solution enables data to flow easily and quickly within an organization, and in most cases includes the entire organization. The net result is higher sales, happier customers and a much-improved bottom line. The reduction in costs due to improved personnel productivity, better sales follow up, improved marketing and service, and an overall impressive growth in general organizational efficiency sometimes produces almost immediate economic benefits .The figures that corporations report of increased profits due to successful CRM implementations range from 25% to 95%, attributable in