Customer relationship management
lastmod 2024-10-17created 2024-10-174 edits
Customer relationship management (CRM for short) is a management approach that aims to turn consumers into one's own customers and retain them over the long term, and a method covering a broad field that companies use to manage relationships with customers, acquire customers, and analyze and store internal information on customers, sellers, and partners.
CRM can be seen from 4 aspects.
- Customer management for gaining a lasting relationship (i.e., Loyalty) - marketing activities that make customers habitually buy the company's products or services
- Management according to each customer's individual characteristics - 1:1 marketing/service for individual customers
- Management through information technology - managing customer information using databases
- Management at the enterprise-wide level
Projects
- Yao - Provides a CRM system demo and a demo of an RFID-based warehouse management system
- Plato - Well suited for building tools for customer support, operations, and CRM
- Nango - CRM: Front, Hubspot, Salesforce, etc.
- Psychic - CRM integration (Salesforce, HubSpot,..)
- Huly - Open-source project management platform - a powerful framework designed to accelerate development of business applications such as CRM systems
Basic elements
- Know: understanding the market and customers (classifying high-profit and low-profit customers, managing customer value with a customer data warehouse and data mining)
- Target: developing the optimal service (which products and services to sell to which customers through which channels)
- Sell: creating new customers (sales force automation systems, campaign management systems)
- Service: retaining existing customers (customer service for creating and maintaining customer loyalty, customer support through call center help desks)
Classification
CRM can be divided into DBM (Database marketing), CRM in the narrow sense, and SFA (Sales Force Automation).
- DBM refers to using databases to carry out marketing analysis and develop strategy.
- CRM in the narrow sense emphasizes differentiated marketing for each customer rather than building and analyzing databases.
- SFA (Sales Force Automation) refers to sales automation technology for strengthening the competitiveness of sales channels.
Functions
- Customer analysis: its functions include customer segmentation, churned-customer analysis, and customer value analysis.
- Campaign management: covers everything from campaign planning to campaign effectiveness analysis.
- Customer response: covers call centers, sales force automation, customer support centers, telemarketing, and so on.
- Customer information: carries out analysis work such as data warehousing and data mining.
- Consulting/integration: carries out the strategy consulting and system integration that underlie the analyzed customer data.
Expected benefits
The expected benefits of CRM are as follows.
- Higher profitability through stronger customer relationships
- Enables target marketing
- Strategic sales informatization using prospects' profile information
- Strategy development based on each customer's contribution to revenue
- Preventing the churn of high-value customers: focused management of customers likely to churn through an alert system
- Reactivating dormant customers
- Increasing customer value through cross-selling, up-selling, resale, and so on
e-CRM
e-CRM means CRM on the Internet. Customer activities on the website are managed and recorded as web logs, information on customer patterns is analyzed, and the company can then carry out various promotions, events, campaigns, and other activities to match. Application areas
- Sales: retail store sales, field sales, mail-order sales, web sales
- Marketing: campaigns, content development
- Service: call centers, web services, wireless services
- Development: new product development, business development