Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information.
Aspects
There are three aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:
Operational - automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative
Collaborative - direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative (self service)
Analytical - 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
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 when 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 describe the history of their interaction each time.
Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call center agents.
Collaborative
Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone (Automated Voice ...