By: Martina Celegato
Submitted: 2009-07-15 08:12:41 | Word Count: 613
In a market and society more and more competitive, we need to seriously reconsider the marketing strategies effective to attract customers and increase their loyalty.
There are various solutions on this purpose, one of the most effective and known is CRM. This is the acronym for Customer Relationship Management, so it means the management of relationship with customers. The main aim of CRM is helping companies to “have customers”, providing a smart tool to handle them. CRM obviously can be applied to various types of companies and various business sectors; it can be useful in the real estate management, in the relationship management, in the debt collection management and so on.
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CRM is also called “1to1” or relationship marketing, and it is the new marketing tool of these years. But the basis is still the database marketing techniques well-known and applied by all companies that do business to business.
CRM consists of 3 types: the operative CRM offers technological and methodological solutions to automate the business processes that provide for the direct contact with customers.
The analytic CRM finds procedures and tools to improve the customer’s knowledge through the extraction and analysis of data from the operative CRM. The cooperative CRM organizes methods and integrated technologies with communication tools (telephone, fax, e-mail etc.) to handle the contact with the customer.
One of the last trends in this field is to use mobile applications. More and more software houses are updating their applicative suites, making them suitable to be used on handhelds and company’s Smartphone. The more mature seem to be exactly the CRM, very useful for managers outside their office. The office job takes place more and more in the mobile filed and the business information have to follow managers and employers also outside the office walls. In this dynamic context the information can not stay isolated but have to be supported by flexible applications.
This is why a lot of entrepreneurial software are evolving, changing themselves also into a mobile version, suitable to be used on handheld devices.
A smart use of this software is very important for the costs management of companies. First of all because they can help planning the actions to pursue and the annexed costs. But the use of these devices, according to a lot of managers, can create a lot of factors of competitive advantage, of which the first one and the more important is to increase sales and the optimization of the employer’s productivity. In addition to this there is also a substantial improvement of services realized for customers.
There are many services at disposal of a company that adopts these strategies, aimed especially at a better and more frequent contact with customers, like chat, forum, databases, informative services provided also on other tools (as SMS to send to one’s mobile phone, or the use of the WAP technology); on-line tickets to signal problems or ask for assistance,; inside tracing of every communication “from” and “to” the customer; history of payments done by the customer; web browsing analysis, for users with a profile, with the help of web analyzer.
Customers management but not only, it is also in a more general sense company management, since before adopting such software it is very important to have a clear a specific marketing strategies. No software can work if the underlying strategy is wrong. And the first step is always understanding and identification of potential customers, their needs and desires.
