Customer relationship management

Introduction: Whenever a firm has a good relationship with their customers, the firm would become more successful in many ways. Customer relationship management (CRM) is to use information about customers to create marketing strategies that develop and sustain desirable customer relationships.

Benefits of CRM: To fulfill a customer relationship management (CRM) we would need to put some efforts into it. However, there are many benefits in improving a relationship between the customer and the producer.

Some benefits:

· Increase in sales, which helps the growth of a firm.

· Marketing Research would be much easier and effective.

· Suggestions of new products and improving of the quality of products.

· Knowing the profitable consumers from the non-profitable.

Successful marketers respond to customer needs and strive to continually increase their profits. CRM helps the firm in a lot of ways which can lead to a better aimed target market. In this way, the firm would have a good reputation among consumers. It also can improve the profits by focusing on the profitable customers and dealing with the non-profitable customers in much less costly ways. It's very useful to have a good relationship with customers, because when having a loyal customer he would tell his friends (other consumers) about the firm. This will help to get other new profitable customers, this may help in the growth of a firm.

How to implement CRM: implementing of a customer relationship management consists of four stage process:

Stage 1: Collecting information

Firstly, the firm needs to collect as much as information as possible to satisfy customer's needs and wants, and concentrate on their buying behavior. Easiest way to do that is by making customers visit their website, online customer services (e.g: an ice cream shop puts on his website "choose your best ice cream flavor for the month"). In that way, marketers can know what consumers like and how they behave when buying a product.

Stage 2: Analyzing customer behavior

Developing new strategies to satisfy consumer's needs and wants, in order to increase sales and grow the firm in a more sufficient way.

Stage 3: Marketing more effectively

Focusing on the profitable consumers and understanding their desires, targeting the most valuable customers.

Stage 4: Enhancing the customer experience

By knowing the needs of the most profitable consumers, it would be much faster in making the most satisfactory products, in this case, the firm would have more time to for other or new customers.

Potential drawbacks: There are a couple of reasons why implementing a CRM does not always have the desired results.

There may be a lack of commitment from people working in the company. By having a poor communication with the consumers.

Depending only on the CRM solution could be risky for a firm, there should be other solutions which can aid the firm's sales and marketing.

Summarized by: Ali ihsan Ali