Introduction Project.docx

Introduction: The biggest management challenge in the millennium of liberalization and globalization for a business is to serve and maintain good relationship with the king the customer. In the past producers took their customers for granted, because at that time the customers were not demanding nor had alternative source of supply or suppliers. But today there is a radical transformation. The changing business environment is characterized by economic liberalization, increasing competition, high consumer choice, demanding customer more emphasis on quality and value of purchase etc. All these changes have made today’s producer shift from traditional marketing to modern marketing. Modern marketing calls for more than developing a product, pricing it, promoting it and making it accessible to target customer, it demands building trust, a binding force and value added relationship with customers. The process of developing a cooperative and collaborative relationship between the buyer and seller is called customer relationship management shortly called CRM.

CRM (customer relationship management) CRM (customer relationship management) is an industry term for methodologies, software, and usually internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationship in an organized way.

According to one industry view CRM consists OF: 

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Helping an enterprise to enable its marketing departments to identify and target their best customer, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team Assisting the organization to improve telesales, account, and sales management by optimizing information shared by multiple employees, and streamlining existing process Allowing the formation of individualized relationship with customer with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits: identifying the most profitable customer and providing them highest level of service. Providing employees with information and process necessary to know their customer understand and identify customer needs and effectively build relationship between the company, its customer base and distribution partners,

Definition: CRM is concerned with creating improved value through the use of customer centric business processes and value through the use of customer centric business processes and the development of appropriate relationships with consumers. Aims of CRM; The CRM is a new technique in marketing where the marketer tries to develop long term relationship with the customers to develop them as life time customer. CRM aims to make the customer climb up the ladder of loyalty The company first tires to determine who are likely prospects I.e. the people who have a strong potential interest in the product and ability to pay for it. The company hopes to strong convert many of its qualified prospect into first time customer and then to convert those first customer into clients- they are those people who buy only form the company in the relevant product categories. The next challenge for the company is to convert these clients into advocates. Advocates are those clients who praise the company and encourage other to buy form it. The ultimate challenge is to convert these advocates into partners where the customer and the clients work activity together to discover ways of getting mutual benefits. Thus in CRM the key performance figure is not just current market share but share of life time value by converting customers into partners. Benefits of Customer Relationship Management; Customer relationship management system may be chosen because it is thought to provide the following advantages:        

Quality and efficiency Decrease in overall costs Decision support Enterprise ability Customer attentions Increase profitability Improved planning Improved product development

Customer service: CRM software provides a business with the ability to create, assign and manage requests made by customer. An example would the called center software which helps to direct a customer to the agent who can best help them with their current problem recognizing that this type of service is an important factor is attracting and retaining customers. Organization are increasingly turning to technology to help them improve their clients experience while aiming to increase efficiency and minimize costs. CRM software can also be used to identity and reward loyal customer which in turn will help customer retention.

History of CRM Customer relationship management (CRM) is one of those magnificent concepts that swept the business world in the 1990’s with the promise of forever changing the way business small and large interacted with their customer bases, in the short term. However, it proved to be an unwieldy process that was better in theory than in practice for a variety of reasons. First among these was that it was simply so difficult and expensive to track and keep the high volume of records needed accurately and constantly update them. In the last several years however newer software systems and advanced tracking features have vastly improved CRM capabilities and the real promise of CRM is becoming a reality. As the price of newer, more customizable internet solutions have hit the marketplace; competition has driven the prices down so that even relatively small business are reaping the benefits of some custom CRM programs.

In the beginning… The 1980’s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a catch phrase to define the practice of setting up customer service groups to speak individually to all of a company’s customer. In the case of larger key clients it was a valuable tool for keeping the lines of communication open and tailoring service to the clients need. In the case of smaller clients, however, it tended to provide repetitive survey- like information that cluttered databases and didn’t provide much insight. As companies began tracking database information they realized that the bare bones were all that was needed in most cases: what they buy regularly, what they spend what they do. Advance in the 1990’s In the 1990’s companies began improve n customer relationship management by making it more of a two-way street instead of simply gathering data for their own use they began giving back to their customers services. Not only In terms of the obvious goal of improved customer service, but in incentives, gifts and other perks for improved customer loyalty. This was the beginning of the now familiar frequent flyer programs, bonus points on credit and a host of other resources that are based on CRM tracking 3333 customer activity and spending patterns. CRM was now being used as way increase sales passively as through active improvement of customer.

Implanting CRM: CRM requires an integration of a firm’s resources: people, operations and marketing capabilities to deliver added value to the customer. CRM should provide businesses and organizations with a single view of their customers and across irrespective of the interactive channel or medium through which the customer accesses the services or product. 1. Advances in information technology, network and manufacturing technology have helped companies to quickly match competition. As a results product quality and cost are no longer significant competitive advantages.

2. The growth in service economy. Since services are typically produced and delivered at the same institution, it minimizes the role of the middlemen 3. Customer expectations are changing almost on a daily basis. Newly empowered customer, who choose, how to communicate with the companies various available channels? Also nowadays consumers expect a high degree of personalization. 4. Emerging real time, interactive channels including e-mail, ATMs and call center that must be synchronized with customer’s non-electronic activities. The speed of business change requiring flexibility and rapid adoption technologies. Real customer relationship management as its thought of today really began in the early years of this century. As software companies began relation newer, more advanced solutions that were customized across industries, it became feasible to really use the information in a dynamic way. Instead of feeding information into a static database for future reference, CRM became a way to continuously update understanding of customer needs and behavior. Branching of information, sub –folders, and custom tailored features enabled companies to break down information into smaller subsets so that they could evaluate not only concrete statistics, but information on the motivation and reactions of customers. The internet provided a huge boon to the development of these huge databases by enabling offsite information storage, where before companies had difficulty supporting the possibilities and CRM took off as providers began moving towards internet solutions. With the increased fluidity of these programs came a less rigid relationship between sales, customer of new strategies for more cooperative work between these different divisions through shared information and understanding, leading to increased customer satisfaction form order to end product. Today CRM is still utilized most frequently by companies that rely heavily on two distinct features: customer service or technology. The three sectors of business that reply most heavily on CRM – and use it to great advantage- are financial services, a variety of high tech corporations and the telecommunication industry, the financial services industry in particular tracks changes in investment habits industry can give financial service providers truly impressive feedback in these areas. Another force driving the adoption of CRM has been the total quality movement, when companies embraced TQM it became necessary to involve customers and suppliers in the needed close working relationship with the customer thus several companies such as formed partnering relations with suppliers and customer to TQM other programs such as JIT and MRP also made use of interdependent relationship between suppliers and customers. On the supply side it pays more to develop relationship is less expensive and more sustainable competitive advantage than acquiring new ones. The globalization of word marketplace makes it necessary to have global account management for the customer.

Identify your customer: To launch a one initiative the company must be able to locate and contact a fair number of customers or at least a substantial portion of its valuable customers differentiating them will help the company to focus its efforts to gain the most advantage with the most valuable customers. Differentiating your customer Customer are different in two principal ways: they represent levels of value and have different needs, once the company identifies its customers differentiating them will help the company to focus its efforts to gain the most advantages with the most valuable customer. Interacting with the customer Interacting is also a crucial component of successful CRM initiative. It is important to remember that interaction just not occur through marketing and sales channels, customer interact in many different ways with many different areas of the organization must be accessible to the customer. Customize your enterprise’s behavior Ultimate to lock a customer into a relationship a company must adapt of its behavior to meet customer’s individually expressed needs this might mean mass Marketing: CRM systems for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email search social media, telephone and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue, alternatively, prospect relationship management (PRM) solutions offer to track customer behavior and nature them form contact to sale, often cutting out the active sales process altogether. In a web-focused marketing CRM solution, organizations create and track specific web activities that help develop the client relationship. These activities may include such activities as free downloads, online video content, and online web presentations Product- or company- related postings Positive product comments, reviews Visitors following link form social channel to online store’s URL Visitors referred to website from online frie

Review of literature Customer relationship management (CRM) as become one of the must dynamic technology topic of the millennium According to chen and popvich (2003) CRM is not a concept is really new but rather due to current development and advances in information and enterprises software technology, it has assumed practical importance. The root of CRM is relationship marketing, which has the objective of improving the long-term profitability of customers by moving away from product –centric marketing. Bose 2002 noted that CRM was invented because the customers differ in there preferences and purchasing habit if all customers were a like, there will be little need for CRM. As a result, understanding customer drivers and customer profitability, firms can better tailor their offerings to maximize the overall value for their customer portfolio. The attention CRM is currently receiving across business is due to the fact that marketing environment of today is highly saturated and more competitive In term of information technology CRM means an enterprises wide integration of technologies working together such as data warehouse, website and intranet /extranet, phone support system, accounting, sales , marketing and production kolder 2000 assured that CRM gives as IT to gather data , which can then be used to develop information acquired to creat a more personal interaction with the customer. In the long term, it produces a method of continuous analysis and reinforcement in order to enhance customer’s life time value with firms Objectives and benefits of CRM Gronroos (2004) explains that an-going relationship with customer will help in providing a sense of security, trust and feeling of control through studies Xu and Walton (2005)have concluded that the major reasons corporation managers are implementing CRM are .    

Improve customer satisfaction retain existing customer Provide strategic information Improve customer life time value

Benefits of relationship as defined by gummerson Gummerson (1994) explains that the building of relationships is key reaching and maintaining a successful market share, gummerson the benefits as: Retention By learning relevant information about the customer such as: names habits preferences and expectations one-on-0ne relations can be formed and customer can be kept coming back continuously. Objective as define by sheriff, nguyen &newby The general objectives of CRM systems are to collect data about interactions with the firm (nguyan, sheriff new by (2007) they also state these points as more specific objectives. Increased customer loyalty Collecting all important information about a customer and having all the relavent data about a customer’s history readily available all the access points in the organization