Customer relationship management

Around 2000 a new category of worker arrived on the market. Basically, marketers realized soon that they gathered too much information. As companies often searches for data at every moment possible through customer purchase, sales force contacts, service and support calls, web site visits, satisfaction survey, credit and payment interactions, market research studies- thus making data management an issue at hand.

Indeed, these information are provided by different department within the company. Each department collect information through their own way of doing, and might be reluctant to give them to anyone at first contact. To face this problem, Customer relationship management has been in some companies the best department to handle this. The department is able to manage precise details about individual customers and manage customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty.

Main companies providing this service are Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce and SAS. They provide simplified information system where to gather customer data. These information systems consist of software and anlytical tools. Part of the customer relationship management consist of using data warehouse to stock information for example, or datamining to search for deep customer data.

To have the software integrated is only a step in CRM. It is not enough. Once you have the information, another job is important, it is to get to the relationship with the customers. This is the most important part because information with no implementation is plain information. Marketers often make the mistake of only talking about the tools, the software. Yet it is just a part of a more important customer relationship management strategy.

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