Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales related activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer service.
Customer relationship management tools have been shown to help companies attain these objectives:[3]
• Streamlined sales and marketing processes
• Higher sales productivity
• Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
• Improved customer service, loyalty, and retention
• Increased call center efficiency
• Higher close rates
• Better customer profiling and targeting
• Reduced expenses
• Increased market share
• Higher overall profitability
• Marginal costing
Challenges
Tools and workflows can be complex to implement, especially for large enterprises. While some companies report great success, initiatives have also been known to fail—mainly owing to poor planning, a mismatch between software tools and company needs, roadblocks to collaboration between departments, and a lack of workforce buy-in and adoption.
Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications with customers. Software solutions then expanded to embrace deal tracking and the management of accounts, territories, opportunities, and—at the managerial level—the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other customer-facing business functions, as described below.
Customer relationship management technology has been, and still is, offered as on-premises software that companies purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure.... [continues]

Read full essay