What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy that businesses use to manage or maintain interaction with customers. CRM entails practices, principles, strategies and guidelines that a company uses when interacting with both current and potential clients. Good customer relationship management involves an analysis of customers' trends, patterns and behaviors to inform the why a company interacts with customers. The primary goal of CRM is to enhance a good customer experience in such a way that current customers are retained and potential customers are gained.

Marketing - What is Customer Relationship Management?

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Marketing - What is Customer Relationship Management?

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Why is Customer Relationship Management Important?

Typically, customer relationship management (CRM) is the approach an organization use in interacting with customers. It includes all aspects of interaction, from discovery to purchase as well as interactions after purchase such as feedback. Aside from enhancing customers' experience through improved customer relationships, companies drive significant sales growth through CRM. In recent times, CRM refers to technology systems organizations that manage interactions with customers through the customer's lifecycle. Companies with good CRM give their customers a unique experience, increase their sales and profitability. Some of the major ways companies push for CRM include sending mass emails to current and potential customers, telephone calls, text messages and website emails and updates.

Types of Customer Relationship Management - CRM Technology

Basically, there are two CRM technologies, these are:

• CRM software: this is a software that helps to collate customers' information that make up a business data. Customers' trends, history, purchase pattern and previous behaviors can easily be identified using this software. The CRM software helps businesses streamline their operations to have an improved customer relations and customer experience. Through CRM software, a business can have an improved customer interaction which will help retain current customers and attract new ones to increase sales growth.
• CRM cloud solutions: this allows business leverage on the internet to have an enhanced customer relation and improved customer experience. This involves access to a computer system and the internet to achieve an excellent CRM.

It is difficult to separate customer relationship management from human management, this is because one cannot exclude the role of humans in CRM. In fact, CRM software and cloud solutions cannot work on their own, they need to be operated by humans. Every company must identify that having a successful CRM is associated with having a proper human management. However, in addition to the role of humans in CRM is the new discussion on the significance of artificial intelligence (AI). According to analysts, there are certain AI applications that will be helpful to CRM, whether now or in the future. This will improve the quality and efficiency of CRM, if the applications are well integrated or adopted.

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