Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Abstract

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has been around for a very long time. The CRM is responsible of administrating and taking care of clients, but in an environment and variables larger than it was in old times. The main objective of CRM is to support customers all the time вЂ" giving commodity, offering the best services and most of all bringing solutions to them.

Introduction

In today's world informations are given and received in a very short period of time. It is possible to access any part of the planet in a simple click of the mouse. Thanks to the Internet, these “travels” became something very common for the people who are leaving in the 21th century.

CRM has many strategies and mechanisms to “serve” customers, but by using the traditional methods, the means to receive real time information are very limited. The Internet has made it possible to serve customers around the world. CRM and Internet together become an efficient tool that companies are using to conquer more clients.

Is through the relationship marketing that companies can plan and apply actions to their clients. Customer relationship is fundamental for marketing, because it belongs to the all of the three phases of sales process: before sales, during the sale and after sales.

Is needed to know about customers' habits and customs to predict any action. If you have your customer's data, you can offer what the customer really wants, because you have the information, historic of purchase and other relevant aspects that will lead to an effective and informal marketing. When we know who is the client it is much easier to identify and to store information about him/her.

Customer Relationship Management

Historic

The market emerged a long time ago, when a primitive man perceived that another human being had a need of a product. When a need can be supplied by an advantaging change, we have two principal ingredients to establish a business: the consumer and the supplier. As the time goes by, the relationship “consumer vs supplier” got a new shape and it changed when new needs and environment appeared.

The development of the world of business was influenced by the technological growth and changes of the consumers' behavior. We need to go back to the past to understand a little bit better those new concepts of market and business of today's world.

During the old times, the process used to acquire goods was based on trades. The evolution of cultures brought more tools for this trading process, since the amount of products increased proportionally to the needs.

There were a lot of logistic difficulties in that time: the transportation was done mainly by carriages, or through the sea by small boats. The market was limited to a small economic sector involving luxurious products.

The sea was a great energy resource to supply the market and the industries that time. Overall to Phoenicians, they lived in a area where the agriculture could not develop because of their poor ground.

The Phoenician, comparing to other Mediterranean countries, was located in a strategic geographical position: it bordered the most cultural and industrial regions and the Phoenicians used the wood of Lebanon forests to build their ships. These factors mixed to the ideas, persistence and ambition of the Phoenicians made their land the market center of that time.

The Phoenicians marketed their products from Babylonia to Egypt, which means that their market was not so huge. Objects made from brassy were the main incentive for Phoenician companies.

We can summarize this fact as: “the cultural evolution brought the need to trade or to develop the commerce”.

To catch the attention of its clients, the Phoenicians made use of a special technique to make clothes. They collected the material from purple shells вЂ" which gave beautiful colors to their clothes. That time, in the whole Asia it was very fashionable and it represented nobility to dress those kind of clothes.

Those clothes represented status, in other words, there was a target group well defined and loyal. After all, who noble person would take risks to go to sovereign's residence dressing another cloth that could contradict the ideas and conceptions of that era?

That kind of product probably would not need a lot of efforts in advertisements, just as we do not see in today's media, advertisements of products like the Mont Blanc watches.

The Phoenicians were the forerunner of customer segmentation, when they used their insight to notice the different customs of the people that they visited and with that, offer suitable stuffs and products to them.

Facts like this show the importance of Phoenicians in the history of market relations in the world. These people went farther вЂ" they had a curious business strategy, which allowed them to centralize the market on their hands. They associated the goods brought from far away countries to legends about winged snakes, giant and poisonous birds, mermaids, etc. whose search could be very dangerous and deathly.

With that, they got to fascinate their customers telling those fantastic legends and at the same time, they got to increase the price of their products and avoid their customers to go to those far away countries to get those products.

Obviously, those customer relationship techniques worked fine due to historical context of that era.

The market stabilization broke only when the competitors came on the scene. The Greeks found out a way to trade the same goods than the Phoenicians. The competition emerged from that and along with it, the need to produce more quality products and establish a more suitable relationship to customers.

The concepts of CRM emerged from a search of new ways of customer relationship to satisfy, keep and trace customers.

Definition

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the latest expression of