What is Customer Relationship Management ?
August 1st, 2007Aspects of CRM
There are three aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:
Operational CRM- automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative
Collaborative CRM- direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative (“self service”)
Analytical CRM- analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes
META Group (acquired by Gartner in April 2005) developed this conceptual architecture in the late 1990s, and dubbed it the “CRM Ecosystem”
Operational CRM
Operational CRM provides support to “front office” business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer’s contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.
One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact “channels” in a company over time without having to repeat the history of their interaction each time.
Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call centre agents.
