CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENTS

Customer Relationship Managements

Introduction

 Customer Relationship Management is a combination of policies, processes and strategies implemented by the Organization for the Unification of interactions and to provide customers a way to track customer information. It involves the use of new technology to attract customers and be profitable, by maintaining a tighter bond with existing ones. A comprehensive literature review is provided here that focuses on customer relation management and what entails with respect to tourism and hospitality.

According to Anderson the 80's saw the start of emergence of customer relationship management in the form of direct marketing. The companies that have benefited greatly includes Digital, Wang, IBM as research show that these companies attained huge profits and success mainly due to their strong marketing as well as well managed customer management system. Customer relationship management as mentioned by Rigby covers managing the relationship with customers and includes many aspects that are directly related with each other.

These aspects are listed down in different section and processes and enable one to understand how important this phenomenon has become with respect to the term marketing and customer satisfaction. The processes and operations include: (Anderson, Kristin, 2002, page 6-9)

Front office operations: direct interaction with customers, such as meetings and face-to-face, telephone calls and e-mail and e-services, etc.

Background processes: processes that ultimately affect the activities of the Office of the receiver (such as billing, maintenance, planning, marketing, advertising, finance, manufacturing, etc.).Trade relations: interaction with other companies and partners, such as suppliers / vendors and retail outlets / distributors, and industry, and networks (pressure groups, trade associations). This section also supports the external network to the front and back office activities.

Discussion

Frederick mentions that Customer relationship management helps in analyzing the key data for managing customer relationships for the purpose of planning targeted marketing campaigns, conceived business strategies, and to judge the success of customer relationship management activities (for example, market share, number and types of customers, revenue and profitability)

The purpose of CRM is to improve the proximity of customers to meet their needs and convert them into loyal customers. Therefore, a CRM project must provide each business sector access to information system to better understand the customer and provide products and services that meet their expectations in the best possible way. , (Frederick, 2003, page 7)

If we observe after the 80's the boom that CRM gave towards businesses is phenomenal. As stated Rigby that Customer Relationship Management provided technological solutions that strengthen the communication between the company and its customers. (Rigby, Darrell, 2004, page 4-12).

They did this by improving the relationships with customers through automation of various components of the customer relationship: Anderson mentions here that the enterprise marketing automation (EMA) is the automation of marketing campaigns. This tool under the umbrella of customer relationship management has benefited companies greatly. This is so as the analysis of information collected about customers allows the company to revise its selection of products to meet the expectations. The implementation of CRM solutions in the enterprise is not just about installing software ad ...