Customer Relationship Management

INTRODUCTION

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a term that enables companies to manage and analyse the relationships and interactions with current and future potential customers by strategies, technologies and practices. CRM is also a strategy that uses to manage the data throughout the lifecycle of the customer, with the aims of the company to enhancing in customer retention, boost the sales growth of the company brand, and business relationships with every customer.

In order to maintain the relationship with customers and keep the business ongoing, loyalty program will be the best choices for company. Loyalty program is a reward program such as giving out company’s products, coupons or free sample, which may attract customers and help organization to improve the profitability.

Except for strategy for generate profits; there is another strategy relationship, which is Relationship Marketing. It helps to foster the customer loyalty and focuses on long term relationship. Which is a strategy that usually company will applied into the business and create a strong bond connection with business and customers.

Besides that, choosing a suitable model for your business is a must. Choosing a right model may help business doing good in developing and implementing the strategy of CRM. There is a few of models that business can choose, such as Value-Chain model, IDIC model, QCI model, Payne’s five process model and Gartner competency model. CRM model are helpful to understand the concept of CRM and also help business to regulate the concept of CRM.  

SECTION 1

CONCEPT OF CRM

As we know, knowing customers well will helps company to serve customers better and will keep their loyalty for long-term. So this is the meaning of Customer Relationship Management. Except for keeping customers in good relationship, it is also to lead to success and growth of organizations in environment of competition, also technological development. To understand more details of CRM, the main theme for CRM can also be business strategy, business process, business philosophy, or even a technological tool.

A business philosophy represents that “CRM is a relationship orientation, customer retention and superior customer value created through process management” (L.Ryals and S.Knox, 2001). For business strategy, CRM is said that the strategy for customer-focused business is offering them a responsive and customized service, to focus on the customer satisfaction and loyalty (A.Croteau and P.Li, 2003). Then, business process stated that a macro level process subsumes numerous sub-processes, such as prospect identification and customer knowledge creation (R.K.Srivastava, 1999). For technological, it is a tool which enable technology to foster the relationships close to customers (M.Hsieh, 2009). CRM also arises in information technology community, which often used to describe technology-based customer solutions (Parvatiyar and Sheth 2001).