Customer Relationship Management – A Tool of Management

The term CRM, arguably, was first put into the public domain around 1993, when Tom Siebel came up with it. So it is closely connected to Siebel Systems - an IT company. Hence the problem named. Many executives are under the misconception that CRM is principally an IT implementation. which explains many of its failures -- and there have been many of them. If technology is applied to a faulty business strategy, all that is going to happen is that the company is going to become more efficient at doing the wrong things. If the core business strategy isn't put right first, you'll have failure. As we view CRM more as a strategy than a process... get the business strategy right first. Decide which customers or segments to target. Develop sensible customer acquisition, retention and development plans. Sort out the channel strategy first (direct or indirect) then sort out which products, services, bundles of value to offer the chosen customers. Once that's in position, then start looking for IT to support it -- but not until then. CRM is putting your customer at the heart of your business. Today it is more important than ever to build better relationships with your customers as, in this day and age of social media; they now talk to 130+ people at a time. They have a megaphone, making it easier for positive and negative messages to spread fast and wide.