The term customer relationship management or CRM refers to certain strategies,practices, and technologies that companies employ to manage and analyze consumer data and behavior throughout the consumer lifecycle with the intention of improving business relationships with customers,customerretention, and growth in sales.
What is a CRM software?
The most commonly used CRM technology used by companies is a CRM software, that combines customer information and documents in a single CRM database allowing business users to access it easily as well as manage them as per their convenience.
Thebig shots
Salesforce.com,Microsoft,SAP, and Oracle are the four largest vendors that dominate the market of CRM systems.
The trend today
With the prolific use of social media and mobile phones upsurging in the general public,CRM providers have upgraded their technology to offer new features that will cater suitably to this set of consumers. Social CRM allows businesses to connect with customers directly through the social media networks like Facebook,Twitter etc
The challenges
- If the data acquired by the CRM systems are not connected,organized and distributed,it fails its purpose
- Brands are also finding it difficult to get a “single view of the customer” on the interface which will allow them to view,access and organize different data sets in asingle dashboard
- When customer data is made complicated by duplicate/outdated information,it retards the business process and declines customer experience.
