BEST PRACTICES: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT



CRM … CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT STRATEGY (CRM Slide Share with 52 Slides)9525-34226500SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING CRM BEST PRACTICES: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENTby:?Ian GordonIssues:?November / December 2002. Tags:?Innovation. Categories:?Strategy.No one company has written the book on CRM. And rightly so, says this author, whose examination of how companies practice this much-talked about discipline led him to develop comprehensive guidelines for enhancing a company’s returns from CRM.That few companies are achieving the results they expected from their investment in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not news. That most companies continue to invest in CRM without a roadmap for increasing shareholder value or even for forging closer customer relationships is also not surprising, since there are few best practices in CRM for companies to follow. In fact, based on our own research and consulting, and a recent examination of best practices in 35 Canadian and U.S. corporations, we could not find one company that excels in every dimension of CRM. However, we did find examples of one or two specific best practices in individual companies. This article discusses these selected best practices, which, we believe, companies should consider when trying to improve the performance of their CRM initiatives. It also discuss the changing role of senior managers that are developing a relationship-oriented organizationA definition and a visionThere are many definitions for CRM, and best-practice companies adopt one that is shared across the organization. Otherwise, the very term “CRM” will conjure up many things to different people and lead to confusion. These companies see CRM as a series of strategies and processes that support and execute a relationship vision for the enterprise. In their eyes, CRM is a series of strategies and processes that create new and mutual value for individual customers, builds preference for their organizations and improves business results over a lifetime of association with their customers.With this definition, an organization can focus on developing the only asset of the enterprise that matters in the long term, progressively deeper relationships with valuable customers. By sharing the definition, they can put the customer first and avoid sending their staff into cycles of interminable CRM programming.These organizations then create a vision for how CRM will change their companies. Some develop the vision according to attributes that are important to both the customer and the company. These include attributes that affect customers’ perceptions of value, how they can bond with the organization, product and company preference and purchase intent.This vision sometimes changes as the firm gains experience in CRM and as technology makes new things possible. For example, at a major Canadian bank, the vision has evolved. Initially the vision was associated with the development of customer information systems. Personnel then identified five components that the firm built in stages to implement key aspects of the vision. These components were associated with developing a complete, real-time, single and accurate view of each customer. Simple though it sounds, it took several years to accomplish given the sheer scale of the enterprise. In this example, the vision was initially conceived in terms of a strategic capability, that of customer information. Today, the vision is more focused on the delivery of differentiated value propositions through products to customers. This illustrates that once best-practice companies put a strategic capability in place to enable CRM, they tend to modify the vision to use the capability for customer bonding, a learning relationship and competitive advantage. Strategic capabilities are even more important than specific strategies in best-practice CRM companies. We discuss this below.A CRM planAt the outset especially, best-practice companies develop their CRM plans in terms of strategic capabilities rather than strategies per se. This helps to ensure that the company can adjust to a wide variety of marketplace and industry changes without affecting the main thrust of the plan. For example, we recently reviewed the plan of an organization considering what to do with CRM in the wake of the events of September 11. Prior to our involvement, it was debating the merits of various programs while the key strategic capability it needed – in this case, developing an ability to listen and respond to customers in a timely manner – was not identified nor discussed.right000Increasingly, best-practice companies base their CRM capability plans not just on technology but also on developing and focusing organizational capabilities in other areas such as CRM processes, people and knowledge/insight. Indeed, we have found that best-practice companies do not first adopt a CRM technology solution and then build their CRM initiatives around it. Rather, they develop a more balanced approach to conceiving and implementing CRM strategic capabilities as described in Diagram 1. There are four main CRM strategic capabilities:Technology: the technology that supports CRM.People: the skills, abilities and attitudes of the people who manage CRM.Process: the processes companies use to access and interact with their customers in the pursuit of new value and mutual satisfaction.Knowledge and insight: the approaches the company uses to add value to customer data so that they acquire the knowledge and insight needed to deepen the relationships that matter.The scale and scope of these capabilities are affected by factors such as the core customers on which the firm has chosen to concentrate, the leadership and culture of the organization, the channels the company uses for stakeholder communications, transactions and logistics and the firm’s business model, strategy and structure. Diagram1: Balancing CRM Strategic CapabilitiesStrategies and tacticsMany companies have CRM strategies that seek to develop additional sales from certain existing customers. Best-practice companies do this, too, and also have strategies that focus on the enablers of the end-customer relationship. For example:Processes– Customer collaboration to jointly plan and create new value, differentiated by class of customer.– Collaboration with distribution channel intermediaries and suppliers to achieve the value each end-customer wants.– Embedding business rules into CRM databases so that customers’ behaviors trigger appropriate actionsTechnology– Integration of the customer’s various touch points with the company– Development of a single, real-time view of each customer– Creating an ability to sell when the customer is ready to buy, and knowing what to offer and how to appeal to each customerPeople– Recognizing that employees have different needs just as customers do, and trying to provide each with the value they want from the company– Creating a self-serve capability to enable employees to take more control of their careers and career development, including what and when they learnMeasurementsMany companies measure the return on investment (ROI) of their CRM programs. Indeed, firms often embarked on a CRM journey because the performance of specific programs could be measured with more assurance than their traditional means of promotion. Best-practice companies know the ROI for each of their programs and use this knowledge expeditiously. For example, a major casino understands guest spending and can rapidly relate this data to the investment the casino made to attract the guest. This leads to new offers affected by the amount the guest spent (lost) and the casino’s investment in the guest. Measurement allows the casino to limit “free ridership,” the provision of offers to visitors who would return anyway without any incentives.As this example suggests, best-practice companies make use of measurements to allow them to manage customer behaviors. Thus, customer profitability, which today is often measured at the gross margin level, is increasingly allocating costs below the gross margin line to individual customers. For instance, costs per customer such as those below are increasingly being considered to arrive at a more detailed assessment of customer profitability:Account management costsNew product concepts developed in collaborationCosts or time saved in new product developmentSavings in new account acquisition from customer referralsCosts associated with inventory levels (finished goods works, in process, raw materials, etc.)Reduced costs of marketing such as co-marketingReduced infrastructure costs such as from shared investmentsCosts of managing customer communications, customer support, complaints, feedback and restitution (payments for returns or errors)Amortization of infrastructure costs such as call centers and Web-sitesMeasurements such as these also help a company decide how much to invest to keep existing customers and how much to spend to attract new customers. This is effectively changing the paradigm in media spending from considering costs in dollars per thousand people to dollars per priority customer.In addition to the measurement of behaviours, best-practice companies measure attitudes. For example, customer satisfaction and favourability (purchase intent) are measured. For business-to-business purchase decisions, customer satisfaction measurement occurs across the enterprise and scores are weighted to arrive at an overall level that allows satisfaction levels to be compared over time. Best-practice companies also understand their performance compared to other suppliers for that account. They track their share of each customer’s spending. By using data such as these, companies are beginning to target specific competitors to transfer customer share one customer at a time and thereby to gain market share. More generally, best-practice companies develop selected competitive measures to help ensure that the performance of their C RM initiative is leading to superior customer relationships.Managing and delivering CRMFor most companies, today’s CRM strategies reflect a material shift in historical marketing and strategy. And, because organizational structure follows business strategy, CRM impacts organizational design. Two areas have a particular impact on the structure of companies:the amount and nature of customer data and the processes by which value is added to the data.how companies compete, especially for those firms that use CRM to compete on scope.Most companies obviously see solid financial data as important for management, leadership and control. They have a financial department and a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) with custodial responsibility for these financial data, including security and management, and the processes by which value is added. Increasingly, companies are coming to believe that customer data are as important as financial data. Some best-practice firms are establishing custodial responsibility for customer data and value-added processes in the same way that they secure and manage financial data. This responsibility includes managing the customer data warehouse and the approaches that add value to customer data. It can also include mechanisms for providing services from a centralized department to the lines of business in decentralized panies competing on scope change their structure frequently as they begin to sell what customers want rather than what the firm has made. This leads some companies to distribute the complementary products or services of others, including customers and competitors, and to sometimes sell their own products and services through others. This can be a marked departure in strategy for those companies that built their businesses through economies of scale. Associated with these changes are new roles and responsibilities for an expanded array of stakeholders and how they interact in the value chain. The challenge for organizational design is to accommodate these changes without disrupting the firm’s existing business.Because the company competing on scope often has fewer but more important stakeholders, CRM companies are beginning to organize around their stakeholders to create the value each wants. For example, professional services firms have client-service teams for their most important clients with representatives of both the firm and the client on the teams. In another example, a major logistics company has established customer teams that bring together the various processes by which the company interacts with its priority customers. Members of the customer teams are drawn from many areas within the firm, such as marketing, sales, advertising, research, operations and finance, as well as their counterparts from the customer. In this case, the management of the customer team falls to sales, which manages all the processes by which customer value is created – an obviously very different role than the historical role of the sales department.Implications for senior managersManagers now developing a stakeholder-centric focus for their organizations may find that they now have additional roles and responsibilities. These can include:1 Providing a compelling vision to keep the organization focused on CRM strategically, tactically and in real time, continuously and mutually with key stakeholders.2 Bringing all customer data together in a single location, aligning processes among stakeholders in the service of the end customer, and smoothly integrating the CRM activities of other executives, lines of business and functional areas.3 Selecting among the often competing requests for projects, funds and people, in accordance with the CRM vision, such as the issue of who is promoting the project, what technology can accomplish or whether new or existing customers merit the most attention from CRM.4 Helping management and staff at all levels to understand CRM concepts and the firm’s vision for CRM, as well as communicating customer, market and profitability data to describe the firm’s progress as it proceeds on its CRM journey.5 Setting expectations to help individuals and groups align their performance with the goals for CRM. Many companies have a large variable component in their compensation structure, for example, which can reward behaviours that run counter to CRM principles. People need to know the link between CRM and their own success or the initiative might be seen as just another program. Among the many aspects of change management organizations typically employ are the recognition of individual and group achievements, and case study successes.6 Ensuring that a sufficient flow of people, time, money and knowledge goes to the CRM areas that need these resources.7 Ensuring that that financial and operational controls are in place to monitor and improve customer performance and that any trust that might have been extended to any stakeholder under the CRM vision is not abused.Few firms today are realizing the potential from their often-considerable investments in CRM. In part, this is because it is uncommon for management and staff to embrace CRM as a vision for how the business could be. Seen only as a means to generate more short-term sales, CRM can be little more than a means to efficiently interact with chosen customers with appropriate value propositions. This is not a bad start but there is much more to be accomplished from looking at the best-practices of those companies that have a broader view of CRM and have set out to answer some important questions, such as:What is the firm’s vision for its relationships with all stakeholders, in addition to key customers?What new capabilities does the organization need to achieve the CRM vision?How will tomorrow’s CRM company be structured?What roles must management take to implement the vision?What measurements must be used to assess CRM performance?How should all stakeholders be aligned to create the value end-customers want?Perhaps no company has yet achieved the full potential for CRM. Considering best practices from a number of firms suggest that opportunities remain for all organizations to achieve better results and deeper relationships with CRM.About the AuthorIan GordonIan Gordon is President, Convergence Management Consultants Ltd. (), which helps organizations assess, address and….Read Ian Gordon's full bio CRM – 5 CRM-Strategies to SuccessDecember 15, 2011?|? HYPERLINK "" omniprise?/?businessCRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the successful blend of a business strategy and technology that enables a company to achieve their goals. The technology provides companies with ways to keep contact with existing customers, manage leads more effectively, measure results more often and standardize business processes. However, software can not do this on its own. The software is actually only there to help enabling the CRM-strategy that a company designed before the implementation of their CRM-software.CRM-strategies vary according to the company they are designed for, however, successful strategies have several things in common. Here are five essential things one should always consider in setting up their strategy.1. Design a strategy before implementing your CRM-software. This might seem obvious since we are talking about essential things in setting up a strategy, but planning projects is often the one thing that companies tend to forget. It is essential to design the CRM-strategy before you go and implement the software. Your strategy should contain all the short, medium and long term goals you have as a company in regard to your CRM usage. The plan must be complete, clear and for everyone to understand.2. A CRM-strategy has to be aligned to the mission and purpose of the organization. It should communicate a consistent message about the company. But having a strong strategy that directly reflects your company’s mission and purpose is not the only important aspect in creating a CRM-strategy. When having different departments, it is essential to also align all departmental strategies with the CRM-strategy. Each department has its own requirements and goals that you have to take in to account when developing your CRM-strategy.3. CRM-strategies must acquire support by their senior executives to succeed. Not having executive sponsorship correlates to CRM failure. But gaining support from other stakeholders is mutually important! Since the sales management team will be the ones holding their salespeople and others accountable for using the CRM software in alignment with the organization’s mission and purpose, it is especially important to get them on board. Without the full support of the sales management team, a successful CRM implementation can be very difficult. Companies may experience serious objections from salespeople as well as their salesmanagers if the CRM-strategy was not discussed with them before.4. The key people from your organization, who will be using the CRM-system, should not only support but also fully understand how CRM works. Giving end-users the time to get to know the new system will make the implementation much easier. The sooner training begins, the sooner end-users will realize they are a part of the process and the quicker they will see the benefits to the application for them. Making them understand how the software works, how it will improve the company’s competitive position and how they will benefit from it personally, will not only give you their support but will also increase their commitment to the software.5. Choose your CRM-software wisely. Take the time to understand your business, decide what you truly need from the system and set up cost parameters in which the software can be implemented. Find a system that fits your business most, then, personalize the program to your needs with the help of the manufacturer. The big picture: How to build a CRM strategy Neil Davey Managing editor Share this content 6th Jan 2014 Back in 2001, the sorry state of CRM implementations was captured for posterity by a headline-grabbing piece of research from Gartner, which reported that 50% of CRM programmes were failing to meet expectations.?Accompanied by a warning that an over-emphasis on technology at the expense of strategic direction was responsible for many of the shortcomings, the research became synonymous with CRM.Yet by the end of the decade, little had changed – a Forrester study from 2009 reporting a 47% failure rate among CRM strategies. Once more, one of the main culprits was software dictating the strategy, rather than the other way around.The CRM industry has changed dramatically in the last four years, with adoption powered by the proliferation of Software-as-a-Service tools. But have businesses still yet learnt the lessons of the past?CRM is a tool and a very powerful tool at that - one that empowers salespeople to better engage with customers – provided that it operates within the framework of a customer-centric strategy.“A CRM system is an important tool for building customer loyalty and encouraging retention, it will also keep your business competitive, but one common trap that can be fallen into by organisations is to see it as a standalone tactic, rather than developing it as a strategic function,” says Andrew Brittain, MD of digital agency Advantec. “If you have a CRM system and it is not currently achieving what you hoped then it may down to the absence of a strategic plan, or because the system is not fully integrated and in line with business goals.”And even those that do have a CRM strategy would be wise to revisit it regularly to ensure that it still fit for purpose in an age of changing customer behaviours and new emerging channels.Content Series … The Complete Guide to CRMThe big picture: How to build a CRM strategy CRM systems: How to vet vendorsHow to ensure a smooth CRM implementationSelling CRM to your sales team: How to ensure...CRM metrics: What should you monitor and measure?How to successfully select a CRM consultantVIEW FULL CONTENT SERIESThe Business Guide to CRM Download now “Recent research we conducted along with Forrester Research identifies a number of reasons for companies deciding to implement a new and improved CRM strategy,” says Julie Hesselgrove, group president at Xerox CMS. “The top three include:Standardising decentralised processes that impede customer relationships – to replace old systems that risk quality, cost and customer experience.Enhancing connections with customers via new technologies – to prioritise human-driven interaction with customers, and move away from dated mass automation.Utilising new channels that offer a path to more personal customer communications – practicing communications across smart devices, video and social media to achieve a personal approach.”Where do you start?But developing or updating a CRM strategy is no mean feat, not least because of the scale of the exercise.“A CRM strategy must look holistically are the business processes and systems that deal with customers, including marketing, sales, ordering, customer care, technical support and business intelligence/customer analytics,” warns Yossi Zohar, head of product and partner marketing, customer management division at Amdocs. “In addition, it should span all interaction channels, including call centre, retail/branch/outlets, web and mobile self service and sales and service partners. The CRM strategy needs to optimise all of the assisted and unassisted processes and ensure all channels are using the optimised processes consistently.”As with any strategy, it is critical that you do your research, and are very clear from the outset about what your key objectives are going to be, both in the short-term and the long-term.“A successful CRM system is not simply a case of going out and buying magic software that will transform your business. The key to it all is knowing what you want to achieve and understanding your customers – before you even think about software!” emphasises Brittain. “It takes good planning, starting with clear and achievable goals. Where do you want the business to go? Therefore what is your vision for the CRM system? Work back from there to allocate and set responsibilities.“The foundation of any strategy should begin with consideration for the range of capabilities that your company has. This should include every step of the process, from the business process to your technology and your people. Focusing on just one or two of these and ignoring others can lead to problems further down the line, as each is part of the journey from the business to the customer. If one part falls down it can have a ripple effect through the whole chain.“Above all, remember that the customer should be at the heart of the strategy, not your product or service. This can mean a complete change in thinking in some cases, but it is an important shift and one that your whole team need to understand and get behind from the start.”Annette Giardina, CRM UK lead at Avanade UK, summarises the following preparatory steps to lay the foundations for building your CRM strategy.Understand the issues and challenges that you currently face when interacting with your customer.? “For example, do your team have the information they need readily available to respond to customer queries??Can you provide a seamless experience for your customer regardless of the channel? Is time being spent with customers or on repetitive manual tasks??This will help you understand your internal challenges,” she explains.Identify your customer journeys.? “A customer journey is how your customer interacts with your business, e.g. purchasing a product, reporting an issue.?Then align your internal business processes with these journeys.? This will help you determine if you are easy or hard to do business with.”Identify how you will measure success, what will your KPIs be.?“Once you have identified them, measure your current state of play.?That way you will have a comparison point.”Identify critical business dates or milestones.?“Do you have a new product launch coming? Do you have a busy period that requires a systems freeze, etc.?This will he you determine critical timing.”With customer data such a critically important part of any CRM project, another task that it is important to undertaken before strategy building begins in earnest is ensuring that your data management is in good shape. Remember, as the old adage reminds us: garbage in, garbage out.?“Without having data on your customers, you can’t learn what does and does not engage them, and what effect this engagement does or doesn’t have depending on what you say, to whom and when,” says Felix Velarde, CEO of Underwired. “So before you can do CRM you need a decent data collection policy, and the means to analyse the data in the context of the CRM programme you envisage for them.”It is vital to ensure all data is accurate and up to date (in accordance with the Data Protection act 1998).Creating a CRM strategyThis preparation will not only have given your organisation a good platform on which to build a CRM strategy, but it will also have determined your CRM maturity, highlighting how much work and the types of work that need to be completed to achieve an effective CRM strategy. Furthermore, you’ll also be clear about whether or not external experts are required to assist in the creation of the strategy.With all of this addressed, John Everhard, technical director at Pegasystems, recommends that businesses start crafting their CRM by ensuring it addresses the following topics:The cultural readiness of the organisation to adopt a customer-centric approach to business.A clear vision of what good CRM looks like across the organisation.Clearly documented customer journeys across the organisation.A communication plan for sharing the actionable items within the strategy, progress charts that show what has been implemented and where.An education program for the entire staff, including third-parties who may have involvement in the interactions with the organisation’s customers.An implementation plan, including a feedback loop that allows everyone to highlight implementation or execution problems.Clear leadership – ideally including the responsibilities of the most senior managers in terms of managing the operationalisation of the strategy.Clear measures that show everyone the value of adopting and applying the strategic initiatives.The selection of appropriate software to support the unique CRM strategy of the organisation.Celebration of excellence when it is achieved – how do we know we are at a point of excellence?Generally, a comprehensive CRM strategy should have multiple levels, including business objectives, data strategy and analytics, experience/communications planning, channel strategy, content strategy, technology, continuous improvement and metrics/measurements.“Once the objectives are set and defined, one can then start mapping the customer journey, utilising all information, data and analytics at your disposal – understand where and in what way your business touches or interacts with the customer,” recommends Ben Silcox, head of data and technology at Havas EHS.“At every one of these touch points you will identify a piece of data or opportunity to impact – you will also potentially identify large gaps in touch points where as a business you are not communicating with the customer, and yet these moments are the ones that matter. Simple conversion and journey segmentation can highlight the difference in these journeys between different types of customers.”Once you have highlighted the moments you wish to impact, you can then build your CRM data strategy, encompassing: what data you have; what data you need; how you use that data to understand your customer; what segmentations you should apply; what propensity models you should use; whether you should use predictive analytics (if you have enough data) to understand when and where to communicate; and whether you should use systems dynamics to understand the complexity of multiple channels and the interaction between those channels in impacting customer behaviour.“You can then begin the creative process of experience or communications planning – what experience can you create, or communication can you deliver that helps the customer make the decisions, take the actions that give them a greater experience or better outcome,” continues Silcox.Next up is the content and channel strategy. “This is where you are matching channels, audiences segments and content together to weave your communications experience,” says Silcox. “What messaging will lead where; what do you want the customer to do there; what channels are best for acquisition vs engagement vs advocacy vs conversion (purchase); do you need to work with any third parties/partners; how does the programme get integrated with other activity taking place in those channels; how much of what type of content do you need to feed the programme; and what needs to be planned vs?reactive?”Before the business begins the process of looking at appropriate software solutions, Everhard recommends engaging the organisation with the strategy so far.“The leadership team needs to clearly define what they mean by their CRM strategy in terms that every employee can understand,” he advises. “This needs to be repeatedly communicated across the organisation along with the procedures and policies that should be adopted by each employee to operationalise the strategy. At this point organisations can look to appropriate software solutions.”Finally, at the end of this process, and when everything else is clear, it’s time to consider which technology platform is most appropriate. “The most important element in your technology choice is integration,” notes Silcox. “A seamless flow of data and integrated analytics will rely on this – and the hard work should be on creating a configuration and implementation that delivers against your strategy only. There are a number of options but this choice is made easier when you have a clearly defined plan and strategy.”Even once the CRM solution has been chosen and integrated, the strategy should ensure that there are ongoing processes in place to monitor, measure and improve CRM.“Once your programme is defined and up and running – the hard work begins!” warns Silcox. “You must continuously listen, measure, and change – looking to learn more and be more effective. A/B tests, multivariate tests, segmented personalised comms, etc. are all important.”ChecklistMatthew Walko, head of strategy at Omobono, summarises the strategic priorities with the following checklist:Relationship objectives - What are the key objectives of the programme? What is the ultimate vision and mission for the brand’s relationship with customers and prospects?Customer need states - Through customer/prospect research, determine the needs of customers throughout their purchase journey and after as a customer. Determine priorities and identify gaps that should be met.User journeys - Map out example user journeys of customers interacting with the business to determine when, how, and what the CRM system would provide.Data strategy plan -Data is the core of the platform. Consideration should be given on how to make sure all data is passed back to the CRM from any additional platforms and how the data flows out of the CRM to any relevant platforms.CRM system plan - Determine the stages of relationship with prospects/customers, map out the moments for contact interaction, and identity the necessary workflows required by employees to make it happen.Content strategy and process - Content is at the heart of CRM. A content strategy must be developed to determine the topical themes, forms, channels, tone and cadence of the relationships with contacts. Equally it’s important to identify a process for creating the content (internal/external), how it’s created (production, design, approvals), and when it will be published (editorial calendar).Feature requirements - Interview end users of the system to determine the most important features and user cases so that the system is selected and built in a way that meets the most important requirements.System selection - Research and demo different systems to determine the one that most thoroughly meets the CRM objectives, customer needs, feature requirements and budget model.Training - Training is a key element to determine adoption. Investing in one-to-one or group training, as well as continued support, will help to establish adoption and unlock the value of the system amongst employees.Brittain concludes: “For organisations looking to develop a CRM strategy I would say it is as much a people and cultural change as it is a technological one. It takes on going investment in people, training and processes and shouldn’t be seen as a quick win. The payback from such a system can be substantial if used strategically and as an integrated part of the business function.”About Neil Davey HYPERLINK "" Neil Davey is the managing?editor of MyCustomer. An experienced business journalist and editor, Neil has worked on a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites over the past 15 years, including Internet Works, CXO magazine and Business Management. He joined Sift Media in 2007.CRM metrics: What should you monitor and measure?Neil Davey Managing editor Share this content23rd Jan 2014 There is certainly no shortage of things to measure in the world of customer relationship management. With modern CRM systems straddling multiple departments, disciplines and channels, it’s a number crunching nightmare.“CRM technology can deliver benefit in lots of different ways,” explains Richard Boardman, founder of? HYPERLINK "" Mareeba Consulting. “You might use it for lead management purposes to help you increase the number of leads you get and the percentage that you convert to end business. It can be used to help you manage your existing customers more effectively and sell more to them. It can be used to help you with your marketing communications or improving the quality and speed of fulfilment of your products and services or streamlining your support operation. It really can be used in lots and lots of different ways.”Indeed, it may even be used to do all of these things simultaneously. With so many moving parts involved in a CRM project, it’s enough to make your head spin. But struggling with CRM metrics may be symptomatic of a much wider problem."A lot of CRM initiatives historically have gone awry or are perceived not to be successful, but when you dig into them you find out that there is really no way to tell if they were successful or not, because you find that the projects didn’t have any metrics to find to be able to determine success," notes Bill Band, VP and principal analyst at?Forrester Research."Typically that points to a deeper rooted issue – it’s not that metrics are so important in and of themselves, but usually the companies haven’t thought through metrics around customer-facing initiatives, and often it speaks that they don’t have a strategy. Metrics are only relevant in relation to a strategy that you are trying to execute. And when I see that metrics haven’t been defined, often the root cause is because there really isn’t a customer relationship strategy that has been worked out."Having already covered the building of a CRM strategy earlier in this series, this shouldn’t be a problem you will encounter. But even with a robust strategy in place, with clearly defined aims, this doesn’t mean that everyone within the organisation has a similarly clear line of sight to the targets - something that Ed Thompson, VP and distinguished analyst at?Gartner?Research believes is a particularly acute problem for the staff working at the coal face.?“One of the problems we have identified is that even if the company knows what it is trying to achieve – in other words, it is pretty clear about its financial goals and top level goals about acquiring more customers or improving campaign responses or lowering cost of service or whatever their goal is – there can be an issue in that Joe Bloggs the frontline employee can’t see what he’s doing in his day-to-day life has got anything to do with it,” he explains. “And the reason is that he’s being measured on something completely different – he’s told to improve his first call resolution rate and can’t see why his metric ties to the big CRM initiative and why he has an impact on it.“The granularity of metrics and how they link together means that people feel disconnected and disenfranchised. You end up with a disconnect between the frontline staff and the senior management and it is very difficult to change that unless you have really thought through the metrics quite carefully and put a metrics plan together.”Clearly, there is more to metrics than meets the eye. And getting the wrong metrics in place not only means that you’ll struggle to monitor and manage performance, but you’ll also potentially create disaffected staff.So how do you get it right?Operational metricsThe three departments that are most associated with the influence of CRM systems utilise a whole range of different operational metrics to measure their related performance. By department, these include:Sales- Number of prospects- Number of new customers- Number of retained customers- Close rate- Renewal rate- Number of sales calls made- Number of sales calls per opportunity- Amount of new revenue- Number of open opportunities- Sales stage duration- Sales cycle duration- Number of proposals givenMarketing- Number of campaigns- Number of campaign responses- Number of campaign purchases- Revenue generated by campaign- Number of new customers acquired by campaign- Number of customer referrals- Number of web page views- User goal completion rate on the web- Time per website visit- Customer lifetime value- Cross-sell ration- Up-sell ratio- Email list growth rateService- Number of cases handled- Number of cases closed the same day- Average time to resolution- Average number of service calls per day- Complaint time to resolution- Number of customer call backs- Average service cost per service interaction- Percentage compliance with SLAs- Calls lost before being answered- Average call handling timeIn addition to these more traditional operational metrics, recent years have seen businesses expand their measurements to outside of the business, specifically incorporating Voice of the Customer feedback measures (such as customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, customer loyalty, likelihood to purchase and likelihood to recommend) and social media metrics (such as sentiment, influence, reach and share of voice)."If you think about the history of CRM from a technology point of view, it has been more defined primarily as an optimisation of internal operational activity, so the metrics that traditionally have been associated with it have been driven from an internal operational point of view," highlights Band. "But companies are becoming more sophisticated at understanding they need to have both the internal operational and the external perception metrics side-by-side as opposed to scattered independently throughout the organisation."Taken as a whole, this represents a staggering number of metrics to consider, although Band emphasises: "You won’t want to do all of these, but people need a starting point."He adds that there are three “buckets” of metrics that he recommends that brands pay particular attention to:Business performance metrics. Band says: “What are the outcomes from a business point of view – the pipeline, closing cases more quickly, cross-sell, up-sell, sales, marketing and service.”User adoption metrics. “Track how the CRM solution is being taken up in the organisation, including number of log-ins and completeness of the data and a host of other IT metrics.”Customer perception metrics. “This includes customer satisfaction and experience. If the customer isn’t experiencing any improvement from their end and you’re not taking that into account then you haven’t got a complete picture.”Sylvain Reiter, development director at Cyber-Duck, rattles off a number that he recommends as particularly valuable:Number of new contacts added per week/month. “Based on your company activities (pitch, networking, etc) you should have a target of potential clients, affiliates, partners, suppliers and so on to be added every week,” he notes.Response to marketing campaign. “A well composed and relevant CRM should have better return/response rate to all your outgoing communications. If not, it may mean contact details are out of date or irrelevant entries are in the CRM.”Productivity. “A CRM should help the staff work smarter, giving them faster access to data and enabling them to make more informed decisions.”Customer satisfaction. “At the end of the day, a CRM is there to help your business provide a better service, so your end customer should give the judgement and confirm your services have improved.”"The key takeaway is that these bread and butter metrics continue to be important – depending on your strategy," notes Band.And it is this line-of-sight from metrics to strategy that he says is of critical importance.He continues: "When you look at ongoing operational metrics, we see of lot of them in companies, but the question is whether they are tied to an overall strategy. Often that is a missing linkage. In the call centre you might have lots of operational metrics, or in marketing there are traditional marketing, like campaign management and close rates and so on, but I see a lack of tying metrics to a strategy."As we established earlier, if operational metrics aren’t tied to the CRM strategy it can create confusion and disconnection. So how can organisations ensure that their CRM strategy, tactics, goals and metrics are all in alignment?Getting the right metricsIn his paper, The Right CRM Metrics For Your Organisation, Band suggests that the starting point is to establish the goal of the CRM initiative, and then build it out from there. For instance, is it to increase revenue per sales rep, decrease customer acquisition costs or decrease service response times? The process of defining a value-based CRM plan starts with linking the highest-level corporate business goals to a clear set of specific CRM strategies and tactics.Forrester suggests the following four step guide:Define and quantify business goals.?Quantify how your CRM initiative will either increase revenues from customers or decrease the costs of acquiring and serving them. For each targeted business outcome, define a method for estimating the size of the expected benefit.Formulate CRM strategies and tactics.?Define your strategies and tactics to achieve the goals you’ve defined and quantified, and identify appropriate tactics for each important customer-facing function, i.e. marketing, sales and service.Establish appropriate CRM measures.?For instance, customer service metrics might include number of calls handled per agent, or first call resolution. Voice of the customer feedback metrics might include Net Promoter Score. Establish the current baseline of performance before you start your CRM initiative and define the increment of improvement that you want to achieve at a specified time in the future. Monitor these metrics on a regular basis and take remedial action if you find yourself falling short.Link CRM goals, strategies and metrics.?For instance, if your business goal is to improve revenue from new sources by 10%, your strategy might be to increase average deal size by selling more solutions instead of individual products. The metrics associated with this approach could be average deal size and average revenue per sales rep.This isn’t always a straightforward process, however. "One of the challenges that people do have is that there is one business goal and single set of tactics and strategies and it all ties together," warns Band. "But in most companies that I work with, they in fact have different brands and different products which may all have different strategies and requirements in terms of what is trying to be achieved. Therefore it is not so black and white to be able to work through this process and end up with one simple set of metrics because most companies are more complex that this implies. But the thinking process at a product or brand level can still be applied."While there is no silver bullet metric to successfully monitor CRM, by applying these principles to your project you should be able to work through the process of finding the most appropriate measures. And if done properly, you’ll not only have metrics that enable you to manage your CRM initiative, but you’ll also provide your staff with a clear indication of what they must achieve to support the overall targets.“People always ask us what metrics they should use,” says Band. “And I say it is hard to say until you tell me what tactic you are trying to implement so you can track that - and that tactic ought to relate to a strategy for achieving your business goal."About Neil Davey HYPERLINK "" Neil Davey is the managing?editor of MyCustomer. An experienced business journalist and editor, Neil has worked on a variety of newspapers, magazines and websites over the past 15 years, including Internet Works, CXO magazine and Business Management. He joined Sift Media in 2007 4 Steps to Implementing a Social CRM StrategyBy?Marcela De Vivo August 7, 2014Are you using social media to improve your customer service?Is your current Customer Relationship Management process inefficient?A fine-tuned social customer service strategy increases customer engagement.In this article I’ll?share four easy steps for developing a social CRM strategy.Why a Social Media CRM Strategy?Just about everybody uses social media in their daily lives. Why not use those online gathering places as an?outlet for customer service?Social media is a great place to offer CRM.A?study by J.D. Power and Associates?found that 43% of branded social media engagement by consumers ages 18-29 was customer service-related, as opposed to the 23% that was marketing-related. This means that social media is an even more useful tool for CRM than it is for marketing!More?recent surveys?show that for over 40% of the polltakers, a quick resolution was the most important goal in a customer service exchange. For another 26%, having their problems resolved in a single interaction was paramount.I talked with Ashley Verril, content strategist for Software Advice, and asked her for?insights on how companies can align?their social media and customer service strategies. Here is the four-step process Ashley shared with me.#1: Choose Your Primary CRM PlatformWhile you may have active profiles on each of the major social channels, it’s important to?designate one platform as your main customer support hub. The one you choose depends on your niche and where your customers are most active. Each option has its own benefits and drawbacks.Bring CRM to the social channel that works best for your customers.Facebook is still the largest social network in the world, so naturally it gives you access to the largest audience. Facebook also offers a great deal of?flexibility for pages—you can easily?use third-party apps to create customized question and answer pages?(as seen below with?Best Buy).Customize your CRM on Facebook.LinkedIn is the main hub for?professional contacts?and B2B marketing. Unfortunately, the only effective way to connect with people on LinkedIn is through active networking. None of the forums are particularly conducive to open discussion—something you definitely need for effective customer service.Google+ is the fastest-growing social network and has all of the resources of Google at its disposal. Right now, the platform appeals mostly to a technical audience and is more?effective for B2B?than B2C. While this may be the go-to platform a few years down the road, it’s still in the process of building a user base.Many companies choose Twitter?as their main social customer service platform because it’s quick, user-friendly and the character limit forces support requests to get right to the point. And, more often than not, Twitter is where customers go to voice complaints, and studies show they expect a response.Twitter is one of the most popular platforms for CRM.Having reviewed each of your options, which one should you choose? It’s always best to?go where your customers are. Which of your social profiles has the most followers and the most engagement? That’s the platform to spend your time on.Regardless of which platform you choose,?make sure all of your customers and followers know how to contact you for support. Include links and information on your social profiles, your website and other marketing materials.Address customer concerns quickly and give them a way to contact you to resolve the issue.When you’ve?set up your social customer service hub,?start actively engaging with your audience. As customers comment or ask questions,?respond to each one promptly?and?reassure them that you take their issue very seriously.#2: Prioritize CRM ResponseAs your audience learns to rely on social media for customer service, you may not have the time or resources you need to address every single concern. To?keep your process running smoothly and efficiently,?establish a method for organizing service requests and identifying which ones are most pressing.Which customer questions and issues will you address first?You have to decide how to prioritize customer service issues. Will you jump to the customer with the most followers? What if a potential lead has an urgent question? Or will you focus on the most vocal unhappy customers? Who comes first?Look for comments and questions?that indicate an interest in your product or service, especially when your answer could impact a buying decision.?Contact those leads and offer to help them resolve an issue or answer a question.If you want a larger audience to see how you’re handling customer issues, addressing people with the most followers will give you the most exposure.Know which customers you’ll address first to streamline your CRM process.Know in advance how you will respond to dissatisfied customers. Appeasing or publicly compensating those with negative comments may condition your customers to come to you with complaints and an expectation of a reward. Rather than publicly compensating a customer,?do it privately, outside of social media.Offer to help resolve customer issues offline.#3: Choose Monitoring SoftwareOnce you’ve established where you’ll address customer concerns and questions and how you’ll prioritize those responses, you need to monitor who is reaching out to you for answers—you don’t want to miss a CRM opportunity.Smaller companies may be able to?make do with?social media listening services?such as? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" HootSuite?or? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" TweetDeck, but larger companies should?invest in software designed specifically for social customer service.Customer service software sets your business up for maximum CRM scalability.If you’re a larger company, I suggest looking at Zendesk and .Zendesk?has a clean, user-friendly interface and is great for tracking and managing backlog data.??compiles all of your customer service conversations so your support team can easily prioritize and manage service requests.#4: Measure DataAs the data pours in, specifically?analyze the percentage of high-priority requests your team responded to?(productivity)?and the amount of time it took to respond?to those requests (efficiency).Measure CRM to ensure it’s efficient and meets customers’ needs.It’s also important to?survey the web to find out what your customers’ expectations are. Look at how quickly customers respond and, in turn, how quickly they expect a response from you (generally 2 hours to no more than half a day).As you analyze and review your data,?compare all three—productivity, efficiency and expectation—and adjust your CRM tactics?as necessary to?accommodate the needs of your clientele.If you find that your CRM agents are only responding to a small percentage of support requests, adjust priorities and establish more specific variables. It may help to combine two social channels instead of one. For example, if you’ve only been using Twitter as your main CRM platform, try monitoring Facebook more closely as well.In addition, reprioritize which customers you respond to first. If you’re responding to general complaints, change your priority to unhappy customers with a large number of followers. Narrowing your initial focus group significantly will streamline your process.ConclusionCustomers are already using social media to lodge complaints, give compliments and ask questions. It’s imperative for businesses to meet their customers where they are and address any customer service or support issues as quickly as possible.While you can create a specific system for CRM, interactions themselves should never be automated. Canned responses are obvious to customers and have a negative impact on the company’s image.What do you think? Have you used social media for customer service? Which platforms have worked best for you??Please share in the comments!ABOUT THE AUTHOR,?Marcela De VivoMarcela De Vivo is CEO of , a boutique social media, SEO, and content marketing agency, blogs at The Alchemy, and specializes in?Google Penalty Recovery?and Link Building.Other posts by?Marcela De Vivo?? [Review] The Social CustomerPosted by?Walter Lim?on 10/05/15 ? Categorized as?Books & ReviewsThe greatest challenge of the?social media age isn’t to grow the largest fan or follower base. Nor?to?achieve the greatest “virality” in our?digital campaigns.Rather, it?is this:“How can we?better reach prospects, convert them to customers, and serve their interests through social media?”While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have found ways to monetise their platforms, many are still figuring out ways to connect one’s communities on social media?with the corporate wallet.Enter “The Social Customer: How Brands Can Use Social CRM to Acquire, Monetize, and Retain Fans, Friends, and Followers”?by?Adam Metz.Covering a wide range of topics on social Customer Relationship Management (CRM), this ambitious book spans a wide spectrum of social business topics. They range from social customer insights, marketing, sales, analytics, demand management, support, and customer experience, to mobile and location based services.Defining Social CRM.First, we need to understand what Social CRM is. Metz provides a good definition in his book as follows:“The customer owns the conversation now, so companies need to change the way they do business. Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy that uses technology, work flow, business rules, and social information to talk with (not at) the customer in a transparent way, to make value for both parties.”?This philosophy of designing processes, workflows and experiences around the customer rather than the company is the key pillar of Social CRM (SCRM).Unlike traditional CRM, Social CRM (or SCRM) is about how companies reach out to customers at the times and channels where the customer feels most at ease. In other words, a company is viewed more as a peer rather than an institution.This can be perceived through the chart below:Courtesy of?The Future OrganizationIn order to make company?brands?“social objects”?(stuff which people want to talk about), companies can consider the?six foundational premises of Social CRM?articulated by?Paul Greenberg. These revolve around?the following principles:Companies should make themselves likable and relatable to customers;Companies should help customers control their lives;Companies should?help customers fulfill their agendas;Companies should be non-obtrusive and un-interrupting;Companies should provide value to the customers; andCompanies should provide delightful and memorable experiences to customers.The Social CRM Process.According to Metz, the Social CRM process is fairly involved. It covers community management, listening on social channels, mining of one’s customer database, establishment of a social CRM team, and the invoking of either macro responses (automated activities like birthday coupons) or micro responses (manual interventions like organising a press briefing).These activities can be visualised by?Chess Media’s?chart below:?Courtesy of?Chess Media Group23 ways to use Social CRM.From the basics, Metz goes on to describe the?23 Use Cases of Social CRM.Covering social customer insights, marketing, sales, service/support, innovation, collaboration, and customer experience, the use cases illustrates examples of companies doing them, market and technology maturity levels, and recommended vendors.These use cases straddle what Metz calls the 5 Ms in social customer insights. They are namely: monitoring, mapping, middleware, management and measurement.You can see how these concepts are categorised in the chart by Altimeter Group and Metz Consulting below:Courtesy of?The Social ConceptSocial CRM Methodology.From the Use Cases, the book proposes that a?Social CRM methodology?could be adopted. Represented by the acronym?lPOSTm, the steps involved are…l = Listening to what your customers are sayingP = People and your relationships with themO = Objectives, ie what your brand wants to doS = Strategy, the stuff that the book teachesT = Tools, the myriad platforms and software neededm = Measurement, a necessary evilBringing Social CRM Strategy alive.To make one’s social CRM strategy come alive, the book proposes the following key actions:#1 Develop a Strategy Canvas.Adopt a?strategy canvas?approach (ala?Blue Ocean Strategy) to differentiate your business from the “red oceans” of competitors.Here you should consider the?Four Actions Framework, namely to eliminate factors your industry take for granted, raise factors of social customer management above industry norms, reduce areas that are less valuable to social customers, and create new factors of value.#2 Differentiate Social CRM from its components.Avoid confusing Social CRM with its disparate components?like database marketing, IT systems, loyalty programmes, social media platforms, or marketing and PR alone. This is important in order to integrate these other activities in a way that brings value to the customer.#3 Measure Social CRM holistically.Create a?holistic way of measuring your Social CRM?activities through dashboards monitoring KPIs such as the following:Net Promoter Scores?– how likely are your customers to recommend you to others?Brand Reputation?– usually provided by social sentiment firms, they monitor online?brand perceptionsSocial Collateral Engagement?–?online “buzz” like conversation levels, influence of commenters, sentiment of comments, and qualitative feedbackSocial Ecosystem Health?– number of online community members, types of content shared, visitor traffic, interactions, and responsesSocial Commerce?– actual conversation to sales, customer reach and group marketing efforts, often by affiliates#4 Craft detailed workflows and pathways.Put together fairly detailed?workflows and escalation paths. These require integrating Social CRM systems with both customer and non-customer facing processes such as the following:Customer service processes – eg call centre, conflict resolutions, technical supportEnterprise Resource Planning (ERP)Supply Chain Management (SCM)The goal here is to provide integrated and seamless customer-support across all touch-points, from reach, acquisition, conversion, to after-sales customer service, customer loyalty to customer?advocacy.#5 Integrate with?social advertising and technologies.Embrace and integrate social CRM with?social advertising and retail?as well as the emerging?opportunities offered by mobile apps?and geo-location technologies. This should ensure that there is coherence in how the company views the customer across the entire spectrum of customer touch-points.A Useful Guide to Social Media with CRM.In a nutshell,”The Social Customer”?provides a comprehensive guide to the emerging?world of social CRM, social commerce and customer experience management.As an introduction to the wide ranging topics, it doesn’t delve deeply into each individual arena. At times, I found it challenging?to visualise how the various multiple systems look like and had to stop to think hard to imagine how A connected to B and C.Having said that, Metz does provide lots of useful links and references throughout the volume. He is also generous in giving credit to many of his contemporaries while citing and modifying their ideas.Overall, the book is a useful guide to companies keen to incorporate CRM approaches to their social media channels. Customer relationship managementFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaBusiness administrationManagement?of a?businessAccounting[show]Business entities[show]Corporate governance[show]Corporate law[show]Economics[show]Finance[show]Marketing[show]Types of management[show]The Organization[show]Trade[show]?Business and economics portalvteCustomer relationship management?(CRM) is an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and potential?customers. It uses?data analysis?about customers' history with a company and to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on?customer retention?and ultimately driving sales growth.[1]One important aspect of the CRM approach is the systems of CRM that compile?data?from a range of different?communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more recently, social media.[2]?Through the CRM approach and the systems used to facilitate it, businesses learn more about their target audiences and how to best cater to their needs. However, adopting the CRM approach may also occasionally lead to favoritism within an audience of consumers, resulting in dissatisfaction among customers and defeating the purpose of CRM.[3]Contents??[hide]?1Software history2Types2.1Strategic2.2Operational2.3Analytical2.4Collaborative3Components4Effect on customer satisfaction4.1Customer benefits4.2Examples5Improving CRM within a firm5.1Analyzing the information5.2Employee training5.3Application6In practice6.1Call centers6.2Contact center automation6.3Social media6.4Location-based services6.5Business-to-business transactions7CRM market8Market trends9Criticism10See also11ReferencesSoftware history[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Software history" edit]The concept of customer relationship management started in the early 1970s, when customer satisfaction was evaluated using annual surveys or by front-line asking.[4]?At that time, businesses had to rely on?standalone mainframe systems?to automate sales, but the extent of technology allowed them to categorize customers in?spreadsheets?and lists. In 1982, Kate and Robert Kestnbaum introduced the concept of?Database marketing, namely applying statistical methods to analyze and gather customer data.[5]?By 1986,?Pat Sullivan?and?Mike Muhney?released a customer evaluation system called?ACT!?based on the principle of digital rolodex, which offered a contact management service for the first time.The trend was followed by numerous developers trying to maximize leads' potential, including?Tom Siebel, who signed the first CRM product?Siebel Systems?in 1993.[6]?Nevertheless, customer relationship management popularized in 1997, due to the work of Siebel,?Gartner, and?IBM. Between 1997 and 2000, leading CRM products were enriched with enterprise resource planning functions, and shipping and marketing capabilities.[7]?Siebel introduced the first mobile CRM app called Siebel Sales Handheld in 1999. The idea of a cloud-hosted and moveable customer bases was soon adopted by other leading providers at the time, including?PeopleSoft,?Oracle, and SAP.[8]The first open-source CRM system was developed by? HYPERLINK "" \o "SugarCRM" SugarCRM?in 2004. During this period, CRM was rapidly migrating to cloud, as a result of which it became accessible to sole entrepreneurs and small teams, and underwent a huge wave of price reduction.[7]?Around 2009, developers began considering the options to profit from social media's momentum, and designed tools to help companies become accessible on all users' favorite networks. Many startups at the time benefited from this trend to provide exclusively?social CRMsolutions, including?Base?and?Nutshell.[7]?The same year, Gartner organized and held the first Customer Relationship Management Summit, and summarized the features systems should offer to be classified as CRM solutions.[9]?In 2013 and 2014, most of the popular CRM products were linked to business intelligence systems and communication software to improve corporate communication and end-users' experience. The leading trend is to replace standardized CRM solutions with industry-specific ones, or to make them customizable enough to meet the needs of every business.[10]In November 2016,?Forrester?released a report where it "identified the nine most significant CRM suites from eight prominent vendors," among them companies such as?Infor,?Microsoft, and NetSuite.[11]Types[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Types" edit]Strategic[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Strategic" edit]Strategic CRM is focused upon the development of a customer-centric business culture.[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Wikipedia:Citation needed" citation needed]Operational[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Operational" edit]The primary goal of customer relationship management systems is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a?single customer view, a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more, summarizing all of the relationships between the customer and the firm. Operational CRM is made up of 3 main components: sales force automation, marketing automation, and service automation.[12]Sales force automation?works with all stages in the sales cycle, from initially entering contact information to converting a prospective client into an actual client.[13]?It implements?sales promotion?analysis, automates the tracking of a client's account history for repeated sales or future sales and coordinates sales, marketing, call centers, and retail outlets. It prevents duplicate efforts between a salesperson and a customer and also automatically tracks all contacts and follow-ups between both parties.[citation needed]Marketing automation?focuses on easing the overall marketing process to make it more effective and efficient. CRM tools with marketing automation capabilities can automate repeated tasks, for example, sending out automated marketing emails at certain times to customers, or posting marketing information on social media. The goal with marketing automation is to turn a sales lead into a full customer. CRM systems today also work on?customer engagement?through social media.[14]Service automation is the part of the CRM system that focuses on direct customer service technology. Through service automation, customers are supported through multiple channels such as phone, email, knowledge bases, ticketing portals, FAQs, and more.[12]Analytical[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Analytical" edit]The role of analytical CRM systems is to analyze customer data collected through multiple sources, and present it so that business managers can make more informed decisions.[citation needed]?Analytical CRM systems use techniques such as data mining, correlation, and pattern recognition to analyze the customer data. These analytics help improve customer service by finding small problems which can be solved, perhaps, by marketing to different parts of a consumer audience differently.[12]?For example, through the analysis of a customer base's buying behavior, a company might see that this customer base has not been buying a lot of products recently. After scanning through this data, the company might think to market to this subset of consumers differently, in order to best communicate how this company's products might benefit this group specifically.[15]Collaborative[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Collaborative" edit]The third primary aim of CRM systems is to incorporate external stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, and distributors, and share customer information across organizations. For example, feedback can be collected from technical support call, which could help provide direction for marketing products and services to that particular customer in the future.[16]Components[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Components" edit]Components in the different types of CRM HYPERLINK "" \l "cite_note-:23-16" [16]The main components of CRM are building and managing customer relationships through marketing, observing relationships as they mature through distinct phases, managing these relationships at each stage and recognizing that the distribution of value of a relationship to the firm is not homogenous. When building and managing customer relationships through marketing, firms might benefit from using a variety of tools to help organizational design, incentive schemes, customer structures, and more to optimize the reach of its marketing campaigns. Through the acknowledgement of the distinct phases of CRM, businesses will be able to benefit from seeing the interaction of multiple relationships as connected transactions. The final factor of CRM highlights the importance of CRM through accounting for the profitability of customer relationships. Through studying the particular spending habits of customers, a firm may be able to dedicate different resources and amounts of attention to different types of consumers.[17]Relational Intelligence, or awareness of the variety of relationships a customer can have with a firm, is an important component to the main phases of CRM. Companies may be good at capturing?demographic data, such as gender, age, income, and education, and connecting them with purchasing information to categorize customers into?profitability?tiers, but this is only a firm's mechanical view of customer relationships.[18]?This therefore is a sign that firms believe that customers are still resources that can be used for?up-sell?or?cross-sell?opportunities, rather than humans looking for interesting and personalized interactions.[19]CRM systems include:Data warehouse?technology, used to aggregate transaction information, to merge the information with CRM products, and to provide key performance indicators.Opportunity management?which helps the company to manage unpredictable growth and demand, and implement a good forecasting model to integrate sales history with sales projections.[20]CRM systems that track and measure marketing campaigns over multiple networks, tracking customer analysis by customer clicks and sales.Some CRM software is available as a?software as a service?(SaaS), delivered via the internet and accessed via a web browser instead of being installed on a local computer. Businesses using the software do not purchase it, but typically pay a recurring subscription fee to the software vendor.[12]For small businesses a CRM system may consist of a contact manager system that integrates emails, documents, jobs, faxes, and scheduling for individual accounts.[21]?CRM systems available for specific markets (legal, finance) frequently focus on event management and relationship tracking as opposed to financial?return on investment?(ROI).CRM systems for? HYPERLINK "" \o "ECommerce" eCommerce, focused on marketing automation tasks, like: cart rescue, re-engage users with email, personalisation.Customer-centric relationship management (CCRM) is a nascent sub-discipline that focuses on customer preferences instead of customer leverage. CCRM aims to add value by engaging customers in individual, interactive relationships.[17]Systems for non-profit and membership-based organizations help track constituents, fundraising, sponsors' demographics, membership levels, membership directories, volunteering and communication with individuals.[21]Effect on customer satisfaction[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Effect on customer satisfaction" edit]Customer satisfaction?has important implications for the economic performance of firms because it has the ability to increase customer loyalty and usage behavior and reduce customer complaints and the likelihood of customer defection.[22][23]?The implementation of a CRM approach is likely to have an effect on customer satisfaction and customer knowledge for a variety of different reasons.Firstly, firms are able to customize their offerings for each customer.[24]?By accumulating information across customer interactions and processing this information to discover hidden patterns, CRM applications help firms customize their offerings to suit the individual tastes of their customers.[24]?This customization enhances the perceived quality of products and services from a customer's viewpoint, and because perceived quality is a determinant of customer satisfaction, it follows that CRM applications indirectly affect customer satisfaction. CRM applications also enable firms to provide timely, accurate processing of customer orders and requests and the ongoing management of customer accounts.[24]?For example, Piccoli and Applegate discuss how Wyndham uses IT tools to deliver a consistent service?experience?across its various properties to a customer. Both an improved ability to customize and a reduced variability of the consumption experience enhance perceived quality, which in turn positively affects customer satisfaction.[25]Furthermore, CRM applications also help firms manage customer relationships more effectively across the stages of relationship initiation, maintenance, and termination.[26]Customer benefits[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Customer benefits" edit]With CRM systems customers are served better on day to day process and with more reliable information their demand of?self service?from companies will decrease. If there is less need to interact with the company for different problems,?customer satisfaction?level increases.[27]?These central benefits of CRM will be connected hypothetically to the three kinds of equity that are relationship, value and brand, and in the end to?customer equity. Seven benefits were recognized to provide value drivers.[28]Enhanced ability to?target?profitable customers.Integrated assistance across channelsEnhanced?sales force?efficiency and effectivenessImproved?pricingCustomized products and servicesImproved customer service efficiency and effectivenessIndividualized marketing messages also called campaignsConnect customers and all channels on a single platform.?In 2012, after reviewing the previous studies, someone selected some of those benefits which are more significant in customer's satisfaction and summarized them into the following cases: HYPERLINK "" \l "cite_note-29" [29]Improve customer services: In general, customers would have some questions, concerns or requests. CRM services provide the ability to a company for producing, allocating and managing requests or something made by customers. For example,?call center?software, which helps to connect a customer to the manager or person who can best assist them with their existing problem, is one of the CRM abilities that can be implemented to increase efficiency.[30]Increased personalized service or one-to-one service:?Personalizing?customer service or one-to-one service provides companies to improve understanding and gaining knowledge of the customers and also to have better knowledge about their customers' preferences, requirements and demands.Responsive to customer's needs: Customers' situations and needs can be understood by the firms focusing on customer needs and requirements.[31]Customer segmentation: In CRM,?segmentation?is used to?categorize?customers, according to some similarity, such as industry, job or some other characteristics, into similar groups.[32]?Although these characteristics, can be one or more attributes. It can be defined as a subdividing the customers based on already known good discriminator.Improve customization of marketing: Meaning of customization of marketing is that, the firm or organization adapt and change its services or products based on presenting a different and unique product or services for each customer. With the purpose of ensuring that customer needs and requirements are met Customization is used by the organization. Companies can put investment in information from customers and then customize their products or services to maintain customer interests.Multichannel integration:?Multichannel?integration shows the point of co creation of customer value in CRM. On the other hand, a company's skill to perform multichannel integration successfully, is heavily dependent on the organization's ability getting together customer information from all channels and incorporate it with other related information.[33]Time saving: CRM will let companies to interact with customers more frequently, by personalized message and communication way which can be produced rapidly and matched on a timely basis, and finally they can better understand their customers and therefore look forward to their needs.[34]Improve customer knowledge: Firms can make and improve products and services through the information from tracking (e.g. via?website tracking)?customer behaviour?to customer tastes and needs.[35]?CRM could contribute to a competitive advantage in improving firm's ability of customer information collecting to customize products and services according to customer needs.Examples[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Examples" edit]Research has found a 5% increase in customer retention boosts lifetime customer profits by 50% on average across multiple industries, as well as a boost of up to 90% within specific industries such as insurance.[36]?Companies that have mastered customer relationship strategies have the most successful CRM programs. For example,?MBNA?Europe has had a 75% annual profit growth since 1995. The firm heavily invests in screening potential cardholders. Once proper clients are identified, the firm retains 97% of its profitable customers. They implement CRM by marketing the right products to the right customers. The firm's customers' card usage is 52% above industry norm, and the average expenditure is 30% more per transaction. Also 10% of their account holders ask for more information on cross-sale products.[36]Amazon?has also seen great success through its customer proposition. The firm implemented personal greetings, collaborative filtering, and more for the customer. They also used CRM training for the employees to see up to 80% of customers repeat.[36]Improving CRM within a firm[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Improving CRM within a firm" edit]Consultants, such as?Bain & Company, argue that it is important for companies establishing strong CRM systems to improve their relational intelligence.[37]?According to this argument, a company must recognize that people have many different types of relationships with different brands. One research study analyzed relationships between consumers in China, Germany, Spain, and the United States, with over 200 brands in 11 industries including airlines, cars and media. This information is valuable as it provides demographic, behavioral, and value-based customer segmentation. These types of relationships can be both positive and negative. Some customers view themselves as friends of the brands, while others as enemies, and some are mixed with a love-hate relationship with the brand. Some relationships are distant, intimate or anything in between.[19]Analyzing the information[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Analyzing the information" edit]Managers must understand the different reasons for the types of relationships, and provide the customer with what they are looking for. Companies can?collect?this information by using?surveys, interviews, and more, with current customers. For example,?Frito-Lay?conducted many?ethnographic?interviews with customers to try and understand the relationships they wanted with the companies and the brands. They found that most customers were adults who used the product to feel more playful. They may have enjoyed the company's bright orange color, messiness and shape.[38]Companies must also improve their relational intelligence of their CRM systems. These days, companies store and receive huge amounts of data through?emails,?online chat?sessions, phone calls, and more.[39]Many companies do not properly make use of this great amount of data, however. All of these are signs of what types of relationships the customer wants with the firm, and therefore companies may consider investing more time and effort in building out their relational intelligence.[18]?Companies can use?data miningtechnologies and?web searches?to understand relational signals.?Social media?such as Facebook, Twitter,?blogs, etc. is also a very important factor in picking up and analyzing information. Understanding the customer and capturing this data allows companies to convert customer's signals into information and knowledge that the firm can use to understand a potential customer's desired relations with a brand.[38]It is also very important to analyze all of this information to determine which relationships prove the most valuable. This helps convert data into profits for the firm. Stronger bonds contribute to building?market share. By managing different portfolios for different segments of the customer base, the firm can achieve strategic goals.[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Wikipedia:Citation needed" citation needed]Employee training[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Employee training" edit]Many firms have also implemented training programs to teach employees how to recognize and effectively create strong customer-brand relationships. For example,?Harley Davidson?sent its employees on the road with customers, who were motorcycle enthusiasts, to help solidify relationships. Other employees have also been trained in?social psychology?and the?social sciences?to help bolster strong customer relationships.?Customer service?representatives must be educated to value customer relationships, and trained to understand existing customer profiles. Even the finance and legal departments should understand how to manage and build relationships with customers.[40]Application[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Application" edit]Applying new technologies while using CRM systems requires changes in infrastructure of the organization as well as deployment of new technologies such as business rules,?databases?and?information technology. HYPERLINK "" \l "cite_note-:6-38" [38]In practice[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: In practice" edit]Call centers[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Call centers" edit]Contact center?CRM providers are popular for small and mid-market businesses. These systems codify the interactions between company and customers by using analytics and?key performance indicators?to give the users information on where to focus their marketing and customer service. This allows agents to have access to a caller's history to provide personalized customer communication. The intention is to maximize?average revenue per user, decrease?churn rate?and decrease idle and unproductive contact with the customers.[41][42][43]Growing in popularity is the idea of gamifying, or using game design elements and game principles in a non-game environment such as customer service environments. The gamification of customer service environments includes providing elements found in games like rewards and bonus points to customer service representatives as a method of feedback for a job well done.[44]?Gamification?tools can motivate agents by tapping into their desire for rewards, recognition, achievements, and competition.[45]Contact center automation[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Contact center automation" edit]Contact center?automation, the practice of having an integrated system that coordinates contacts between an organization and the public, is designed to reduce the repetitive and tedious parts of a contact center agent's job. Automation prevents this by having pre-recorded audio messages that help customers solve their problems. For example, an automated contact center may be able to re-route a customer through a series of commands asking him or her to select a certain number in order to speak with a particular contact center agent who specializes in the field in which the customer has a question.[46]?Software tools can also integrate with the agent's desktop tools to handle customer questions and requests. This also saves time on behalf of the employees.[14]Social media[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Social media" edit]Social CRM?involves the use of social media and technology to engage and learn from consumers.[47]Because the public, especially among young people, has increasingly using social networking sites, companies use[19]?these sites to draw attention to their products, services and brands, with the aim of building up customer relationships to increase demand.Some CRM systems integrate social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to track and communicate with customers. These customers also share their own opinions and experiences with a company's products and services, giving these firms more insight. Therefore, these firms can both share their own opinions and also track the opinions of their customers.[16]Enterprise feedback management software platforms, such as Confirmit, Medallia, and Satmetrix, combine internal survey data with trends identified through social media to allow businesses to make more accurate decisions on which products to supply.[48]Location-based services[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Location-based services" edit]CRM systems can also include technologies that create geographic marketing campaigns. The systems take in information based on a customer's physical location and sometimes integrates it with popular location-based GPS applications. It can be used for networking or contact management as well to help increase sales based on location.[14]Business-to-business transactions[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Business-to-business transactions" edit]Despite the general notion that CRM systems were created for the customer-centric businesses, they can also be applied to B2B environments to streamline and improve customer management conditions. For the best level of CRM operation in a B2B environment, the software must be personalized and delivered at individual levels.[49]The main differences between business-to-consumer (B2C) and?business-to-business?CRM systems concern aspects like sizing of contact databases and length of relationships.[50]?Business-to-business companies tend to have smaller contact databases than business-to-consumer, the volume of sales in business-to-business is relatively small. There are fewer figure propositions in business-to-business, but in some cases, they cost a lot more than business-to-consumer items and relationships in business-to-business environment are built over a longer period of time. Furthermore, business-to-business CRM must be easily integrated with products from other companies. Such integration enables the creation of forecasts about customer behavior based on their buying history, bills, business success, etc. An application for a business-to-business company must have a function to connect all the contacts, processes and deals among the customers segment and then prepare a paper. Automation of sales process is an important requirement for business-to-business products. It should effectively manage the deal and progress it through all the phases towards signing. Finally, a crucial point is personalization. It helps the business-to-business company to create and maintain strong and long-lasting relationship with the customer.CRM market[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: CRM market" edit]The overall CRM market grew by 12.3 percent in 2015.[51]?The following table lists the top vendors in 2012-2015 (figures in millions of US dollars) published in?Gartner?studies.[51][52][53][54]Vendor2015 Revenue ($M)2015 Share(%)2014 Revenue ($M)2014 Share(%)2013 Revenue ($M)2013 Share (%)2012 Revenue ($M)2012 Share (%) CRM5,17119.74,25018.43,29216.12,52514.0SAP AG2,68410.22,79512.12,62212.82,32712.9Oracle2,0477.82,1029.12,09710.22,01511.1Microsoft Dynamics CRM1,1424.31,4326.21,3926.81,1356.3Others15,24558.012,52054.211,07654.110,08655.7Total26,28710023,10010020,47610018,090100The four largest vendors with CRM system offerings are?Salesforce,?SAP,?Oracle, and?Microsoft, which represented 42 percent of the market in 2015.[51]?Other providers also are popular for small and mid market businesses. Splitting CRM providers into nine different categories (Enterprise CRM Suite, Midmarket CRM Suite, Small-Business CRM Suite,?sales force automation, incentive management, marketing solutions,?business intelligence,?data quality,?consultancies), each category has a different market leader. Additionally, applications often focus on professional fields such as?healthcare,?manufacturing, and other areas with branch-specific requirements.[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Wikipedia:Citation needed" citation needed]Market trends[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Market trends" edit]In the Gartner CRM Summit 2010 challenges like "system tries to capture data from social networking traffic like Twitter, handles Facebook page addresses or other online social networking sites" were discussed and solutions were provided that would help in bringing more clientele.[55]?Many CRM vendors offer subscription-based web tools (cloud computing) and SaaS. Some CRM systems are equipped with mobile capabilities, making information accessible to remote sales staff.[56]?was the first company to provide enterprise applications through a web browser, and has maintained its leadership position.[57]Traditional providers have recently moved into the cloud-based market via acquisitions of smaller providers:?Oracle?purchased? HYPERLINK "" \o "RightNow" RightNow?in October 2011[58]?and?SAP?acquired? HYPERLINK "" \o "SuccessFactors" SuccessFactors?in December 2011.[59]The era of the "social customer"[60]?refers to the use of social media (Twitter,?Facebook,?LinkedIn,?Google Plus,?Pinterest,?Instagram,?Yelp, customer reviews in?Amazon, etc.) by customers. CRM philosophy and strategy has shifted to encompass social networks and user communities.Sales forces also play an important role in CRM, as maximizing?sales effectiveness?and increasing sales?productivity?is a driving force behind the adoption of CRM. Empowering?sales managers?was listed as one of the top 5 CRM trends in 2013.[61]Another related development is?vendor relationship management?(VRM), which provide tools and services that allow customers to manage their individual relationship with vendors. VRM development has grown out of efforts by ProjectVRM at Harvard's?Berkman Center for Internet & Society?and?Identity Commons' Internet Identity Workshops, as well as by a growing number of startups and established companies. VRM was the subject of a cover story in the May 2010 issue of?CRM?Magazine.[62]Pharmaceutical companies were some of the first investors in sales force automation (SFA) and some are on their third- or fourth-generation implementations. However, until recently, the deployments did not extend beyond SFA—limiting their scope and interest to Gartner analysts.[63]Another trend worth noting is the rise of?Customer Success?as a discipline within companies. More and more companies establish Customer Success teams as separate from the traditional Sales team and task them with managing existing customer relations. This trend fuels demand for additional capabilities for more holistic understanding of the customer health, which is a limitation for many existing vendors in the space.[64]As a result, a growing number of new entrants enter the market, while existing vendors add capabilities in this area to their suites. In 2017,?artificial intelligence?and?predictive analytics?were identified as the newest trends in CRM.[65]Criticism[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: Criticism" edit]See also:?anonymization?and?customer rightsCompanies face large challenges when trying to implement CRM systems. Consumer companies frequently manage their customer relationships haphazardly and unprofitably.[66]?They may not effectively or adequately use their connections with their customers, due to misunderstandings or misinterpretations of a CRM system's analysis. Clients who want to be treated more like a friend may be treated like just a party for exchange, rather than a unique individual, due to, occasionally, a lack of a bridge between the CRM data and the CRM analysis output. Many studies show that customers are frequently frustrated by a company's inability to meet their relationship expectations, and on the other side, companies do not always know how to translate the data they have gained from CRM software into a feasible action plan.[19]?In 2003, a? HYPERLINK "" \o "Gartner" Gartnerreport estimated that more than $2 billion had been spent on software that was not being used. According to CSO Insights, less than 40 percent of 1,275 participating companies had end-user adoption rates above 90 percent.[67]?Many corporations only use CRM systems on a partial or fragmented basis.[68]?In a 2007 survey from the UK, four-fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they had installed. 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of their existing systems.[69]?However, market research regarding consumers' preferences may increase the adoption of CRM among the developing countries' consumers.[70]Collection?of customer data such as?personally identifiable information?must strictly obey?customer privacylaws, which often requires extra expenditures on legal support.Part of the paradox with CRM stems from the challenge of determining exactly what CRM is and what it can do for a company. HYPERLINK "" \l "cite_note-71" [71]?The CRM paradox, also referred to as the "Dark side of CRM", HYPERLINK "" \l "cite_note-:102-3" [3]?may entail favoritism and differential treatment of some customers. This may cause perceptions of unfairness among other customers' buyers. They may opt out of relationships, spread negative information, or engage in misbehavior that may damage the firm and its reputation. Such perceived inequality may cause dissatisfaction, mistrust and result in unfair practices. A customer shows trust when he or she engages in a relationship with a firm under the idea that the firm is acting fairly and adding value to his or her life somehow. However, customers may not trust that firms will be fair in splitting the value of their products or services. For example,?Amazon's test use of?dynamic pricing?(different prices for different customers) ended with very poor public relations for the company.[72]?As seen in the?Amazon?example, although firms use both human and technological factors to assess a proper CRM process, experts suggest that focusing on the human factors, like management, increases the potential of successful CRM, since managers can make a coordinated effort on organizational changes within a company, which often affects customer satisfaction.[73]CRM technologies can easily become ineffective if there is no proper management, and they are not implemented correctly. The data sets must also be connected, distributed, and organized properly, so that the users can access the information that they need quickly and easily. Research studies also show that customers are increasingly becoming dissatisfied with contact center experiences due to lags and wait times. They also request and demand multiple channels of communications with a company, and these channels must transfer information seamlessly. Therefore, it is increasingly important for companies to deliver a cross-channel customer experience that can be both consistent as well as reliable.[14]See also[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: See also" edit]Comparison of CRM systemsMarketing orientationSocietal marketing?(also see section:?Societal marketing)Sustainable market orientationCorporate social responsibilityRelationship marketing?(also see?Relationship orientation?)Vendor relationship managementReferences[ HYPERLINK "" \o "Edit section: References" edit]Jump up^?"Management Tools - Customer Relationship Management - Bain & Company".?. Retrieved?23 November?2015.Jump up^?Shaw, Robert (1991).?Computer Aided Marketing & Selling. 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