Week 4 Project

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Customer Relationship Management Systems

CRM is a business strategy supported by software. Software vendors provide CRM systems. The vendors either support sales force automation (SFA), e-commerce, marketing automation, data mining, Web-based personalization, OLAP, contact management, customer support, campaign management, data warehousing, or geographical information systems (GIS). These systems can facilitate CRM but none of them is a CRM by itself.

Organizations implement CRM generally to move from being product-centric to customer-centric, to use IT tools to improve business, and to make integrated customer-contact information available to all customer-contact personnel. Companies have been spending an average of $9 million annually on CRM initiatives. The advent of the Internet has signi�cantly increased customer expectations.

The key to CRM is to:

Identify how the customers want you to relate with them, adapt your organization to support the goals, and then apply the right technology that supports the efforts.

Identify the process gaps and conduct a process gap analysis for each functional area.

Break down process gaps to identify the detailed process steps that contribute to your observed disconnects. The greater the gap the more opportunity there is to make improvements.

Use your process requirements as selection criteria for new software and share your process requirements with potential vendors.