Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of enhancing, managing, integrating and where appropriate automating all customer interactions and streamlining the various channels and processes involved. CRM is a philosophy as well as a set of software tools that helps to create a customer-centric organisation, resulting in improved customer retention, higher customer profitability, increased effectiveness of sales and marketing and stronger customer relationships.

CRM touches all aspects of an organisation and it is inextricably linked with the organization’s fulfillment, e-Commerce, Business Intelligence, Financial and publishing specific modules.

In a customer-centric organisation the customer is the starting point for everything. This means that anyone who is interacting with a customer should be able to retrieve all information about that customer from a single source, without having to change systems and/or databases. This also applies to prospects, or potential customers, suppliers, agents, authors, end-users or anyone with whom the company relates.

During a prospect or customer interaction the prospect or customer may wish to perform many tasks. For instance, a customer may wish to: place an order, inquire about the status of an existing order, request information on a product, inquire about his or her account, make a payment, request a quote or pro-forma invoice, report a problem, inquire about the progress of a previously reported problem and much more.

The CRM System allows customer service representatives or other authorised personnel to perform any of the functions mentioned above. There is no duplication of data or business processes and no need to re-key information which allows for an efficient, accurate and rapid response to customer requirements. [Read more…]

Customers & contacts 

Online campaigns

Activity management

Calendars & resources

Templates

Academic adoptions

Other CRM maintenance