CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. There are hundreds of books, thousands of learned academic papers and scores of Websites dedicated to the subject of CRM.
Essentially, CRM aims to put your customers at the centre of the information flow of your company.
CRM is an application that enables companies to make the move towards being a customer centred organisation by putting the customer at the centre of all the information that relates to them and allowing authorised people within the organisation to access the information.
In a customer centred organisation, salespeople would have access to all the information that affects their relationship with their customer. The conversations, the emails, the complaints, the complaint resolutions, all the information that had been sent to the customer, who else in the company the customer had spoken to …… everything that affects their ability to service the customer and sell more product or services to them.
Customers of a customer centred organisation feel more valued. Their requests are dealt with more rapidly and accurately because all the information required to service the request is in one place. Customer centred organisations may have a higher customer retention rates than competitors organised along traditional lines because of this.
If a sales person wants to know about what issues are outstanding with customer service for a particular customer, then they have to make contact with the holders of that information and wait for a response. If the salesperson is chasing the information in response to a question from the customer, then the customer also has to wait.
So, although many companies are information rich, the information is compartmentalised. It is not corporate knowledge and the ability to access information and to deliver it rapidly to customers is low – High quality customer service is compromised.
Tags: CRM, Customer Relationship Management, SAP, SAP CRM, SAP CRM 2007, SAP CRM 7.0
