In the marketplace today CRM has become an important tool to attract and keep customers for the continued existence of any business. Many companies look forward to customer relationship management as a strategy that focuses on cultivating, managing, acquiring, and preserving customers. The concept of customer relationship management emerged in the early 1990s. It has evolved into a strategy that uses technology to achieve its goals. The term customer relationship management' is mainly used for methodologies that can help an enterprise to manage customer relationships in an organized manner. Three major parts of customer relationship management application are identified. These include operational customer relationship management analytical customer relationship management and collaborative customer relationship management. Among all, operational customer relationship management targets at contacting customer directly through sales, marketing and service.
Operational CRM deals with the automation of customer-facing processes. These processes take in sales, marketing and customer service. This kind of managing customer relationship works with the use of computer technology to achieve its goals. The interaction with a customer is thus added to a customer's history which enables the staff to retrieve information on customers from the database as and when required. The processes of operational customer relationship management develop customer data for a variety of purposes such as:
Managing Campaigns
Sales Force Automation
Enterprise Marketing Automation
Sales force automation is a type of Operational managing customer relationship method which is designed to automate sales activities of a company. This method uses software applications for assigning list segments to salespeople and allowing list contacts to be called or e-mailed. Other job includes tracking responses, generating reports as well as creating leads for the team.
CRM for a company is highly recommended for the company and its customers also. Although there are advantages and disadvantages yet customer relationship management proves to be beneficial for the enterprise. Companies are keen on implementing highly customized customer-management practices. The companies that have in-house IT resources and support systems also seem to include on-demand or hosted method. These methods can be used by customers seeking to implement standard processes and companies that possess basic integration requirements.