Description of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) may be regarded as a crucial component of almost any business. Generally, it may be defined as a combination of strategies, guidelines, practices, principles, and technologies used by a company for interaction with its customers. In turn, customer relationships include the analysis of current behaviors, purchasing patterns, customer trends, forecasting, and direct interactions within the framework of service-related processes and sales.
The essential components of CRM are business analytics, the tracking of customer activity, automated, consistent response, and customer feedback management. This report addresses CRM using examples from industries and companies, along with its improvement depending on the type of consumer.
Companies and Industries With and Without CRM
For a prevalent number of companies, CRM has multiple benefits. First, assisting in customer satisfaction contributes to customer retention and related sales growth. Tracing a client’s activity helps address his expectations and needs more efficiently. In addition, collecting data related to consumers’ habits and behaviors allows companies to develop more effective marketing strategies. That is why CRM should be valued as a necessary aspect of performance for all organizations in the spheres of sales, marketing, tourism, and catering. In other words, in these industries, businesses heavily rely on a growing number of customers and their satisfaction for stable growth and development.
Examples of companies with extreme value in CRM systems are Amazon, Apple, and Coca-Cola. All of them establish contact with their consumers, provide excellent customer service, assist in problem solutions, and offer personalized products on the basis of data collection, technological advancements, and tracking of consumers’ activities (Wood, n.d.). Modern CRM software allows companies to manage customer lifecycles and develop new approaches to targeting on the basis of their information, including interests, education, and past purchases.
At the same time, regardless of the crucial role of CRM for businesses, not all companies apply it. However, it is essential to differentiate between organizations that require CRM systems but cannot afford them financially or refuse them due to managers’ unprofessionalism or poor expertise and companies that do not depend on CRM at all. While the former’s decisions may lead to failure, the latter has substantial reasons for ignoring the value of CRM. In the majority of cases, these companies have a small number of specific customers who can be managed easily or do not have customer histories due to the absence of repeat business (Armour, 2021). Examples may be industrial companies that work with governments and other large corporations.
References
Armour, H. (2021). Do I need a CRM system? Really Simple Systems. Web.
Wood, D. (n.d.). CRM examples: Customer relationship management for your business. Chetu. Web.