Customer relationship management in its broadest sense simply means managing all customer interactions. In practice, this requires using information about your customers and prospects to more effectively interact with your customers in all stages of your relationship with them. We refer to these stages as the customer life cycle. The customer life cycle has three stages:
■ Acquiring customers
■ Increasing the value of customers
■ Retaining good customers
It is a concept of understanding and tracking customer behavior and experiences to customize the offer that forms the basis of any CRM programme in a large company.CRM ties the potential of relationship marketing strategies and IT [information technology] to create profitable, long-term relationships with customers.In order to endure long-term success, the role of marketing in a firm is to contribute to building strong market assets, including a valuable customer portfolio.
Customer relationship management (CRM) helps companies improve the profitability of their interactions with customers, while at the same time; makes the interactions appear friendlier through individualization. To succeed with CRM, companies need to match products and campaigns to prospects and customers – in other words, to intelligently manage the customer life cycle.
CRM provides enhanced opportunities to use data and information to both understand customers and co-create value with them. This requires a cross-functional integration of processes, people, operations and marketing capabilities that is enabled through information, technology and applications.Customer relationships must be carefully managed and customer loyalty must be earned.Today,customers are looking for suppliers who understand their needs and who can respond to those needs with relevant offers, using the communication channels the customer prefers.
Aims of CRM
The CRM is a new technique in marketing where the marketer tries to develop long term