Now more than ever, the customer is king. In today’s competitive business landscape, recognizing this fact is imperative for a company’s success.

To help businesses cope with the ever-increasing customer demands, many companies have chosen to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy to manage the customer-facing processes of their business.

Customer Relationship Management is nothing new. In fact, it’s been the foundation of business since the first barter ages ago. What is new are the strategies, technologies and applications that enable better management of customers, customer information and the business as a whole.

Even with these latest advances, the basic fundamentals of CRM are constant. Ask any business and you’ll hear the same demands:

"We need a 360 degree view of our customer"
"We need to track our marketing leads"
"We need to obtain more customers"
"We need to measure our marketing return on investment"
"We need sales force automation"
"We need to increase our customer satisfaction"

It incorporates applications in marketing, sales, and service to give the individuals who interact with the customer the ability to access valuable customer information. CRM can also consolidate that customer view across multiple channels including the Web, call centers, field service, sales reps, and partners so that they can better market, sell, and service their customers.

The primary CRM focus areas support the requirements of the customer-facing processes of a business:

• Marketing Automation applications give marketers the ability to create, plan and execute their campaigns to a targeted audience.

  By using CRM, marketers can also access the necessary business intelligence to better understand which campaigns are working and which customers to target with a specific offer. This type of information reduces wasted time and money on sending out the wrong promotion to the wrong customer.

• Sales Force Automation or SFA helps sales people track leads and opportunities for forecasting and to optimize their sales across all sales channels. SFA also helps reps target whom to call on, what to sell, and to understand how their customers prefer to buy their goods or services.
• Customer Service applications enables reps to resolve service issues throughout multiple channels, whether it be through the Web, a call center, fax or field service rep.

  Customer Service applications and Interaction Center applications enable customers to solve their own problems on a self-service model for efficient problem resolution.

CRM provides employees with the business intelligence and processes necessary to better understand customers needs and effectively build relationships between its customer base and its partners.

CRM also links its customers, employees and suppliers over the Web, the phone, fax, in person and through partners. Companies can then improve relationships with customers, add value, reduce costs and improve efficiencies in their business processes.

An integrated CRM strategy gives the marketer access to intelligent information on customer profiles as well as campaign metrics and analytics.

Marketing intelligence on campaign metrics can help the marketer understand which channels are most effective, which campaigns are generating the most leads, and which lists resulted in better response rates. This enables marketers to measure campaign effectiveness and allocate resources to the most successful tactics.

These conclusions can also be used as a basis for future campaign activities. For example, a marketer planning a campaign to existing customers should have knowledge about past customer sales, service requests, and even customer satisfaction. This helps the marketer tailor promotions to customers who provide the most profits for the organization.

When marketing campaigns are based on comprehensive customer knowledge, tight customer profiling and segmentation, and the ability to tailor offerings based on an individual’s preferences and needs, they generate better-qualified leads that can secure a sale and deepen customer loyalty.