Customer relationship management (CRM), recognizes that customers are at the heart of any business. A company's success is dependent on managing its relationships. CRM is about building long-term, sustainable customer relationships that provide value for both the customer as well as the company.
Customer relationship management system is a business strategy that selects and manages customers to maximize long-term value. It requires a customer-centric culture and business philosophy to support sales, marketing, and service processes.
1. Operational CRM
Operational CRM refers to common business functions such as customer service, order management and invoice/billing.
2. Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM is a process that collects, stores, extracts, processes, interprets, and reports customer data to a user who then analyzes them.
3. Collaborative CRM
Collaborative CRM is all about communication, coordination, and collaboration between customers and vendors. Different types of customer relationship management can be categorized based on the products or services they offer.
Evaluation of CRM
CRM, in general, is a way of recognizing that customers are the heart of a business and that the success of a company depends on managing its relationships. Although it overlaps with relationship marketing in some ways, not all relationship marketing can be considered CRM. Customer relationship marketing can be even broader because it involves a one-to-1 relationship between customer and seller.
A company must be able to and willing to change its behavior towards a particular customer in order to be a true one-to-one marketer. This is based on the information it has about that customer. CRM basically means treating different customers differently.