Customer Relationship Management

The purpose of business is to create customers and then to keep them.

Many businesses make more profit from ongoing relationships with their customers than from the original sale, for example, aircraft engines, ink jet printers and software.

It is important for businesses to obtain new customers and also to develop and maintain excellent long lasting relationships with their existing customers.  Customer Relationship Management software is designed to help organisations achieve these goals.

Not all customers necessarily want a good relationship with their supplier, especially consumer type customers, but they do want a good experience when they deal with their supplier. CRM also encompasses Customer Experience Management.

CRM has become a generic term which encompasses wider goals than just managing relationships.

• Finding new customers
• Demand generation (existing and new customers)
• Customer Experience Management
• Customer Relationship Management

CRM software can help organisations achieve the above goals by:

• Communications
• Workflow automation
• Data capture
• Data organisation
• Reporting
• Alerting
• Escalations
• Data-mining
• Time management
• Knowledge-sharing
• Collaboration
• Feedback
• Exception handling

The first wave of such CRM software (1998 - 2001) from vendors such as Siebel and Oracle (Siebel now owned by Oracle) achieved success (and a lot of hype), but they also generated disappointment and dissatisfaction, especially from the end-users who had to enter data into this software.

The main lesson learned from this first wave was that CRM software must be easy to use, especially for customer-facing team members in your organisation.

See User Adoption section under Why Dynamics?.