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Let’s kick-off by taking a fundamental look at what we mean by CRM… CRM as an acronym can stand for various different things. A quick search on Wikipedia pulls up Crew Resource Management, Centralised Resource Management, Content Resource Manager… the list goes on. While all these are all valid, this article is about Customer Relationship Management, and how, done right, it can help grow your business. You may already have read about CRM in the news, trade journals or industry watches. While much of the fuss about CRM has focused on technology, CRM as a concept is as old as trading itself. Believe it or not, you already ‘do’ CRM! Rather than being a specific tool or technology, CRM can be simply defined as the way you manage your relationships with your customers across all the various customer touch-points. Let’s illustrate this with an example... At your local market on a Saturday morning, a grocer begins to build rapport with regular customers he sells to every week. (At least, a good one does anyway.) Over time, he begins to predict what his most regular customers are going to buy. Based on this insight, he starts to realize that putting the freshest, juiciest tomatoes at the front of the store draws in more, similar minded customers. If a customer complains that his carrots aren’t tasty enough, he’s the first to hear it. While primitive, the above example illustrates the basics of CRM at work. Satisfying existing customers, building a relationship, using customer data to gather insights about the market, and quickly solving customer problems are all at the core of CRM. Things get a little more complicated however, when due to his overwhelming success, our grocer decides to open a second market stall. And then a third in a town five miles away. He now has a dilemma… he cannot be at all his stalls at once, so he has to rely on other people to run them for him. While he is not on hand at every stall, valuable transactional data (what people are buying) is slipping away. He rarely gets to hear of his customer’s problems because they are dealt with, un-logged, by his staff. Our trader is now in need of a CRM system, to gather all this information and present it to him in an easy-to-digest format. Still, this may not necessarily mean buying a computerized system, in this situation a paper-based system may work perfectly well. You should be able to see from this example that CRM is operating to some degree in every business, and that CRM should not be synonymous with ‘IT’. CRM itself is a strategy, and the tools you use to achieve success are the technology. It may be worth copying that last sentence out, and keeping it in mind next time you read an article about CRM!
Article Source: http://www.realworldtactics.com/articledirectory
David Hunter is Senior CRM Analyst at ProspectSoft, the UK's leading supplier of CRM solutions to growing companies. You can read more about what David has to say about CRM by signing up for our free CRM e-course at www.prospectsoft.com.
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