GptAdmin : Business : Customer_Relationship_Management

Customer Relationship Management programs provide the software to assist in keeping track of and matching customers and their needs with all facets and functions of your business. Unlike customer service departments Customer Relationship Management serves more specifically to recognize all the individual functions and services of your business and for integrating that information together with the needs and requirements of your clients. Customer Relationship Management can be as basic as a database of all clients and their pertinent information that is then accessible to all departments and therefore easily matched to the functions and services provided by you, thus providing you with a competitive edge. A Customer Relationship Management database offers the facility of tracking the relationship history and the trends of the relationship between company and client thus assists in helping to predict or foresee the future needs and requirements of the client. The companies on this page are some of the leaders in the industry.

Sites:

» #1 CRM Software | Customer Relationship Management On-Demand -

Salesforce.com delivers more than just a powerful, easy-to-use customer relationship management (CRM) product. We offer a complete architecture that empowers every business to experience the benefits of on-demand throughout its entire organization.

» CRM Software Pre-built for Your Industry - CRM Industry Solutions -

Industry Solutions

To help you build your business around your customers, Siebel offers 23 industry-specific applications and more than 100 industry-specific solution sets. These pre-built solutions contain best practices and business processes to address the unique business needs and challenges of your industry.

Siebel industry solutions minimize customization, enable rapid deployment, and significantly reduce total cost of ownership.

» CRM Today: #1 CRM Resource - Customer Relationship Management Marketing, CRM Solution -

CRM is a business approach that integrates People, Processes and Technology to maximize the relations of an organization with all types of customers.

The true value of CRM is to transform strategy, operational processes and business functions in order to retain customers and increase customer loyalty and profitability.

Aris Pantazopoulos - Founder, CRM Today

CRM is a comprehensive approach which provides seamless integration of every area of business that touches the customer - namely marketing, sales, customer service and field support-through the integration of people, process and technology, taking advantage of the revolutionary impact of the Internet.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate and manage the needs of an organization's current and potential customers. It is a journey of strategic, process, organizational and technical change whereby a company seeks to better manage its own enterprise around customer behaviors. It entails acquiring and deploying knowledge about one's customers and using this information across the various touch points to balance revenue and profits with maximum customer satisfaction.

» Darwin Executive Guides - Customer Relationship Management -

What is CRM?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

What is the goal of CRM?

The idea of CRM is that it helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. If it works as hoped, a business can:

provide better customer service make call centers more efficient cross sell products more effectively help sales staff close deals faster simplify marketing and sales processes discover new customers

increase customer revenues

That sounds rosy. How does it happen?

It doesn't happen by simply buying software and installing it. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must first decide what kind of customer information it is looking for and it must decide what it intends to do with that information. For example, many financial institutions keep track of customers' life stages in order to market appropriate banking products like mortgages or IRAs to them at the right time to fit their needs.

Next, the organization must look into all of the different ways information about customers comes into a business, where and how this data is stored and how it is currently used. One company, for instance, may interact with customers in a myriad of different ways including mail campaigns, Web sites, brick-and-mortar stores, call centers, mobile sales force staff and marketing and advertising efforts. Solid CRM systems link up each of these points. This collected data flows between operational systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that can help sort through these records for patterns. Company analysts can then comb through the data to obtain a holistic view of each customer and pinpoint areas where better services are needed. For example, if someone has a mortgage, a business loan, an IRA and a large commercial checking account with one bank, it behooves the bank to treat this person well each time it has any contact with him or her.

Are there any indications of the need for a CRM project?

Not really. But one way to assess the need for a CRM project is to count the channels a customer can use to access the company. The more channels you have, the greater need there is for the type of single centralized customer view a CRM system can provide.

How long will it take to get CRM in place? A bit longer than many software salespeople will lead you to think. Some vendors even claim their CRM "solutions" can be installed and working in less than a week. Packages like those are not very helpful in the long run because they don't provide the cross-divisional and holistic customer view needed. The time it takes to put together a well-conceived CRM project depends on the complexity of the project and its components.

How much does CRM cost?

A recent (2001) survey of more than 1,600 business and IT professionals, conducted by The Data Warehousing Institute found that close to 50% had CRM project budgets of less than $500,000. That would appear to indicate that CRM doesn't have to be a budget-buster. However, the same survey showed a handful of respondents with CRM project budgets of over $10 million.

» SAS Customer Relationship Management Solutions -

SAS® Customer Intelligence

Who are your best customers? What can you do to retain them? How can you attract others like them? How can you improve the profitability of all your customers? The truth is that most companies have difficulty understanding and managing customer life cycles and profitability. This difficulty is due to problems designing and executing effective marketing campaigns, as well as problems measuring their effectiveness.

In the Spotlight

Begin Building a Marketing-Ready Enterprise SAS Marketing-Ready Enterprise Assessment

The CMO's Strategic Agenda: Building the Marketing-Ready Enterprise

Download these SAS sponsored reports from The Aberdeen Group.

Business operates today at breakneck speed, and large marketing organizations must deliver and track sophisticated, event-driven marketing communications within increasingly tight timeframes.

Companies also struggle to coordinate outbound campaigns with inbound customer interactions, meaning that customer behavior often fails to trigger more timely communications.

To create customer and prospect profiles, identify your most profitable customers, optimize multichannel communications and anticipate customer needs, marketers need the ability to:

Create customer intelligence from the mountains of disconnected customer data the company collects on a daily basis.

Apply that intelligence to create the ideal marketing mix or channel distribution and execute more targeted, effective inbound and outbound campaigns.

Measure the value of those campaigns and feed that information back into the planning process.

SAS Customer Intelligence comprises a family of solutions that help you maintain and grow profitable customer relationships. These fully integrated and extendable solutions truly give you the knowledge to interact with the right customers at the right time, through the right channel.

SAS Marketing Automation gives you the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalized customer communication strategies. Using SAS Marketing Automation, marketers can create more accurate, analytically derived segments and then use that information to conduct more effective outbound campaigns.

As marketing organizations become more and more sophisticated, they realize the need to support event-driven marketing, which involves careful, real-time tracking of customer behavior. SAS Interaction Management helps you view each individual customer's behavior over time and act on significant changes immediately – when intervention is likely to have the most impact.

When inbound and outbound communications continue to grow and mature, companies recognize that customers typically qualify for a variety of solicitations. Consequently, it becomes necessary to optimize the mix of interactions with a particular customer. SAS Marketing Optimization evaluates multiple campaigns simultaneously to determine which products should be marketed to individual customers for maximum return – all while factoring in budget and channel constraints, as well as customer contact policy restrictions.

» Strategy consulting around customer relationship management, CRM. -

What we do?

We are a management consulting firm dedicated to helping companies create and implement high impact customer based business strategies. We help our clients identify differences within their customer base and then use that insight to maximize the value of every customer relationship.

How we are different

We are customer strategy specialists who focus exclusively on addressing complex issues from a business standpoint. As objective strategists, we have no technology bias that limits our thinking. The result is a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of our clients' technology investments.

How we can help you?

Our capabilities in strategy development, process design and momentum building add value throughout the implementation of a customer initiative. Our expertise includes responsible information stewardship , customer portfolio management, touchmapping and more.

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The most innovative strategic thinking from Don Peppers and Martha Rogers is embodied in their newest book, Return on Customersm. This breakthrough book advances the concepts and tenets of business valuation to the next evolutionary stage, documenting the customer base as a revenue-producing asset for businesses, capable of driving a company’s long-term economic worth. Click here to read more.

Last Updated: 2005-10-27 03:28:40