Uses And Limitations Of Info Systems In Customer Relationship Management
The Uses & Limitations of Information Systems
In
Customer Relationship Management
The goal of every enterprise is simply to get, keep and attract customers. For a company to focus on its customers as the key to a competitive advantage, it doesn’t mean sacrificing operational efficiency or a product edge. It does, however, mean using new strategies which nearly always require the use of new technologies.
Introduction
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the practice of intelligently finding, marketing to, selling to, and servicing customers. CRM is a broadly used term that covers concepts used by companies and public institutions to manage their relationships with customers and stakeholders. Technologies that support this business purpose include the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.
There are 3 aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:
• Operational- support to business processes, sales and marketing. Each customer interaction added to customer history. This CRM makes heavy use of data mining.
• Collaborative- coordinate multi-channel service given to customer by providing infrastructure for effective support to customer issues.
• Analytical- analyses customer data for trends in behaviours, design of specific customer campaigns and prediction of probability of customer defection.
There are varied outlooks on the true meaning of CRM. Some advocate it is software based and helps track data and information about customers to enable better customer service. Others think of CRM as a means of communication between business and customer, eliminating the use of technical procedures and instead opting for face-to-face discussions to provide a more inter-personal means of communicating. Both perspectives are aimed at improving the service provided to the customer, one mainly based on efficiency and the other based on personal interaction.
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