Customer Relationship Management

Name: Swetha R K
PRN: 13020841170
MBA 2013-15 Operations

Customer Relationship Management deals with managing every aspect of business that has
an interaction with the current and future customers or deals with managing the touch points.
The main aim of CRM is to improve bottom line. This is accomplished by giving a better
service to customers when compared to competitors. A good CRM also diminishes costs,
waste, and complaints.
An effective CRM process helps in bringing about an effective and efficient process and
thereby, reduces costs. It also highlights poor operational processes and inefficiencies or gaps
in the process flow. It connects to customer touch points, such as Media, Physical, phone,
wiki, blog, mail, web etc., and helps in facilitating and streamlining interaction with
customers.
An effective CRM helps in automation of sales force. Every operation involved in selling of a
product, starting from needs identification, specifications, developing proposal till closing of
sale, can be made easier and effective if customers are involved in every stage. There will be
lesser hassles making the operation of the sales force hassle-free and streamlined.
CRM also helps in customer service and support by coordinating all the service operations
and customer support processes such as customer complaint handling, enquiries and product
returns. CRM, thus, plays an important role for operations because it gives a better idea of the
customers needs and issues and helps in faster response and thus ensures better customer
satisfaction.
CRM provides with key customer data from various sources that can be used to provide
insights on key customer needs, identities, expectations and issues in the current operational
practices and processes. From the insights that customer data provides, the direction in which
operational practices can be reorganized and refined can be identified. Overall the
organization's service flows and teams work more efficiently.