Technology As Innovator

Please click on the image for the full version.

4. Customer Relationship Management

4.1. Definition

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) consists of

1. All Customer-focus functions such as: sales, marketing, customer support
2. Software and Tools for automation of these functions
3. Processes to integrate and support the tasks and tools

4.2. CRM Typical Elements

Sales force automation

SFA tools track prospects, contacts, and activities, allowing managers to follow leads through the pipeline, forecast revenue, and catch bottlenecks. Because of the revenue-forecasting requirements, SFA has always emphasized metrics even more than other areas of CRM..

Tele-Marketing and Tele-Sales Tracking

In many ways, their requirements are closer to those of support tracking and indeed many vendors offer contact center modules that can serve both inbound and outbound contact centers.

Product configuration

Product configuration tools allow users to customize complex products to their exact requirements.

Marketing automation

Often called campaign management, marketing automation allows the design, execution, and management of campaigns. Depending on the sophistication of the tool, the campaigns may use a variety of media and include segmentation and list management capabilities. Marketing event planning is another potential component of marketing automation.

Support tracking

Support-tracking features include the ability to track the history of support requests from inception to resolution, including routing, ownership, escalations, and transfers. Another important area is the provision of a customer database to track service contracts. The contracts area is where integration with the sales system or with the accounting system may come into play.

Field service

Field service has different requirements than service that is provided from a support center, much as a telemarketing group needs different features than a field sales force. Like field sales, field service employs a mobile workforce and it has special requirements such as the management of parts and spares. Many field service tools allow users to communicate through wireless communications.

Knowledge base

Knowledge base functionality is useful in all areas of customer-focused functions. It has the ability to expose the knowledge base to the users through a variety of search capabilities, as well as the ability to support the creation and maintenance of documents.

Customer portal

Web-based customer access to the CRM system is now an absolute requirement. Customer portals and the functionality around them are sometimes called e-CRM and the subsystems are called e-sales, e-marketing, or e-support.

Analytics

One of the benefits of CRM is an improved ability to view and analyze customer-related activities. Together with Business Intelligence and KPI, Analytics function provides a very powerful tool in managing customer expectation to meet the enterprise’s objectives.

ERP Series Previous Posts

ERP Series vol 2: ERP System Characteristics

ERP Series vol 1: ERP Definition & Advantages

Free & Open Source Enterprise Resource Planning Software