Customer Relationship Management Essay -- Business CRM

CRM Features and Benefits CRM (Customer Relationship Management) helps companies to understand, anticipate and respond to their customers' needs in a consistent way, right across their organization (Is4Profit, 2006,1). CRM is a business strategy designed to improve profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction. It consists of software, services, and a new way of thinking to improve profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction (Sibel, 2006, 1). Practicing CRM requires an efficient and integrated internal business system. Many businesses benefit from the organizational discipline CRM imposes, as well as from the technology itself. CRM can benefit and organization in that it can develop better communication channels; collect vital data, like customer details and order histories; create detailed profiles such as customer preferences; deliver instant, company-wide access to customer histories; Identify new selling opportunities. (Is4Profit, 2006, 1). CRM involves centralizing all customer data and au tomating much of the tedious work in managing sales, marketing, and customer service so that professionals can spend more time helping their customers become more successful and less time on administrative tasks. CRM has also come to include a new type of business intelligence software called analytics that provides managers with a real-time snapshot of their sales, marketing, and service efforts. This will help them make real-time changes to the business to ensure they meet their growth and profitability goalsÂâ€"instead of after-the-fact. The benefits of CRM are clear: by streamlining processes and providing sales, marketing, and service personnel with better, more complete customer information, CRM allows organizations to ... ...uilt industry-specific editions; 98 percent loyalty rate; 12 years of CRM experience; more than 3.7 million users worldwide; and world-class hosting. References: 20/20 Software Inc. (2006). Comparing Top 11 CRM Software Solutions. Retrieved February 27, 2006 from http://www.2020software.com/software/display.asp?tMethodID=5&tMethod= category&ic_campID=26&ic_pkw=customer%20relationship%20management%20software Is4profit, Inc. (2005). CRM: What are the benefits? Retrieve February 27, 2006 from http://www.is4profit.com/busadvice/crm_customer_relationship_management/1_crm_benefits.htm SAP Inc. (2006). Customer Segmentation. Retrieved February 28, 2006 from http://www50.sap.com/businessmaps/1F7462BEA45C42ABA9937C42BF256EA5.htm Siebel Inc. (2006). What is CRM?. Retrieved February 28, 2006 from http://www.crmondemand.com/crm/what-is-crm.jsp