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Glossary:
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is establishing and maintaining
long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers.
It involves gathering & analyzing customer data, formulating
strategies & taking action based on the data.
CRM has been existing in some form or other in most successful
companies. The heightened interest & media hype recently has been
due to enabling technologies, which makes it possible for an organization
to implement CRM swiftly & in a cost-efficient manner. Unfortunately,
technology as always is only an enabler, leaving the final success
of any CRM initiative to the strategy implemented by the organization.
- Use customers to guide the content and structure of the corporate
knowledge base
- Aim for a quicker response to customer queries
- Give the customer the right information at the right time
- Customer self-help via a knowledge base, for example, a FAQ
on the company website is cost effective & resources available
can be diverted to handle customer inquiries requiring human attention
- Customers should drive the customer service process. Adjustments
should be made based upon statistics about the current focus in
a call center, web usage statistics, seasonal fluctuations, new
product release cycles, etc.
- Decide on the strategy first, then look for enabling technologies
- Keep learning about customers' requirements & preferences to
fine tune the CRM effort
- Calculating ROI on CRM investments is on a long term basis (beginning
after 1 year), as it does not directly lead to new business but
new business practices
- Direct ROI calculations are possible for systems where the customer
is the end user
- Store information about customers from every source, be it legacy
or operational systems
- Segment customers to aid in decisions like whether to reduce
loss on unprofitable customers or enhance profitability on currently
profitable ones & have targeted CRM initiatives. Treat each customer
as a profit center
- Contaminated data (Typos errors, use of abbreviation, aliases
in names, etc.) can be corrected by using a software (Vality Technology),
training the IS department or outsourcing the modeling & cleaning
work
- Take care of legal issues including customer privacy (especially
in sensitive industries like health care & finance), before putting
up customer data for sale/barter
Table: CRM applications & their respective vendors
| Application |
Area of coverage |
Vendors |
| Web based |
Search engines, Chat rooms, IM, Call center integration,
Website personalization |
Various |
| Interactive Voice Recognition
(IVR) |
Automated call center |
Nortel Networks, Siebel
Systems, Periphonics, RightNow Technologies |
| Sales Force Automation |
lead tracking, opportunity management, contact management |
Siebel Systems, Webizus Technologies |
| Customer Service and
Support |
call center management,
online help facilities, internal help desk, and expert
knowledge-based systems |
Siebel Systems (after
acquiring Scopus Technology), PeopleSoft (after acquiring
Vantive) |
| Marketing Automation |
automated e-mail response systems, campaign management/execution
tools, surveys and contest management, management and
distribution of marketing materials (both hard copy and
online) to sales personnel and partners |
Various websites holding online contests & surveys |
| Customer data collection
& interpretation |
gathering & storing
customer information, processing customer data, accessing
customer information, organizing customer data, modelling
and analysing customer data |
E.piphany's, Siebel
Systems, Vality Technology |
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