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What is CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT?

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT first came unto the scene as mere software
that organized and displayed customer information in a format that enabled customer service
agents to offer fully informed and holistic customer service. This nascent software initiated the
birth of a new philosophy in business strategy. The idea is that when a customer support
representative - or any agent that deals directly with the customer- sits with a client they should
also have all the marketing and sales etc. information relavent to that customer at his fingertips
as well. That is the way to cultivate customer loyalty and solidify a strong client base.
The success of applying the CRM philosphy in full scale depends on 3 crucial elements: people,
process, and technolgy. The first crucial element requires the employees - the people of the
company - to take the CRM initiative seriously. Each and every employee must invest time and
energy into using and maximizing the potential of the CRM. This attitude is closely tied with the
process element. A company must possess a collective attitude - or reshape the process of their
business transactions to depict this attitude - of wanting to better serve the customer, and of
feeling enthused to do so by utilizing the CRM. Thirdly, it is important that technology of the
CRM be tailored to the company's needs and easy to access and use. Without the three elements
the very integrity of the CRM is compromised.
The technique of learning the customer's needs and habits is the foundation of business success.
This line of thinking is the recipe for business success, and the CRM is the array of cooking
utensils that allows that recipe to become a reality. What is that reality? Gaining insight about the
customers that allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added
cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing
processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of
customer and overall profitability.
A successful CRM is like a dream come true for most companies, but that dream doesn't
materialize without effort. Each of the three crucial elements mentioned above must be
adequately addressed: The employees must be motivated to make the CRM work. The present
methods of the company must oftened be reformulated to support the goal of the CRM - of
creating high quality customer relations. And the right technology must be acquired. Workable
solutions can be web-based and paid for on a monthly basis. Truly tailored solutions often take a
year or more to purchase, customize, and install, and can cost millions of dollars.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT is an
Asset to Any Service Oriented Company.
As the financial community today makes great strides in convergence and globalization, a
resultant pressure is imposed on insurance and financial businesses - to keep up with the
competition and commoditization while delivering quality and personalized customer service.
The recent economic decline has moved the emphasis from investment to profitablilty and
consequently places a demand for imporved service and simultaneous reduction of expenses on
the industry.
The only solution is a CRM. A CRM is the only way to maintain a consistent relationship with
the customer despite globalization; thus retaining and extending the clientele base. It is the only
way to ensure prompt service despite the fact that the customer identity no longer exists within
one organization, region, or channel. It is the only organized approach to cutting costs without
diminishing service.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT is
Especially Important or Insurance Companies.
After collaborating with insurance experts and business analysts, we have designed a CRM that
is tailored for insurance company needs. Our research confirms that our CRM can contribute
greatly to the retention of customers and heightening the value of each agent-client interaction.
Since insurance agencies today must coordinate multiple venues of client communications -
mail, email, phone calls, personal visits, customer support, and field sales, our CRM is specially
designed to manage this aspect of business. With automated management of daily workflow for
new and existing clients and contacts, and a report generator to document daily service
schedules, prompt attention to customer needs can be administered without draining the time of
the account executives and managers.
Our CRM does an excellent job of scheduling and documenting customer service and placing the
necessary background information at the service agent's fingertips - thus keeping the office
organized and informed, and the clients happy.
The Versatility of Our CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT
Small businesses master the philosophy of a CRM without the actual technology. The beauty of a
small business is its ability to maintain friendly personal relationships with customers thus
demonstrating to them their value. The technology of a CRM becomes necessary as the business
expands and needs to take an organized approach to maintaining quality relationships with
customer.
This being the case, it is imperative that the CRM be able to grow with the company as it
continues to expand. Our CRM boasts the versatility we are speaking of here. This is how:
It allows employees to add CRM users, products, services types easily.
It enables employees to manage account/contact information and monitor the product sale
penetration simultaneously.
It Generates reports that help employees stay on top pf services that are commonly
forgotten or pushed off.
It centralizes data and places it at the fingertips of all users.
It cuts back on duplicate information and the need for executives to spend time create
schedules and reports.
It reviews customer interractions and produces critical reports for executives to use as a
base for improvement in company customer service.
It can easily integrate your existing applications.
Here are some things to consider when deciding whether you business has graduated from
posessing the quality of genuine 'smallness' to posessing a need for CRM to maintain the
'smallness' quality despite expansion.
If the following is true of your business, you are ready for a CRM.
your nucleus of customers encompasses a wide variety of backgrounds and interests.
Your services and products are varied.
Your customers contribute or modify your services and products regularly.
You utilize multiple modes of communication for customer interaction.
Your company has multiple locations - and the same information must be accessible to all
of them.
**********IN 21st century knowledge is most important asset the companies and
organization own. Core knowledge assets are those of employees, partners, suppliers,
customers and competitors. Customer knowledge is more vital to business success than
ever before. Getting closer to customer and effectively responding to their needs is a grest
to beast their loyalty, and encourage deeper relationship. Today Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) is the key that fulfills the promise of helping sellers to please all of
people (customers) most of the times. In this digital age, the age of never satisfied
customers, leading enterprises are indentifying the need to change from a product centric
business to the customers centric one.
CRM is a fine art harnessing the intelligence that is embedded in a companys data
and transforming it in to profitable relationship with their customer. Building customer
relationship is a complex undertaking. It is an organizational discipline that includes the
identification, attraction and rention of most valuable customer in order to sustain
profitable growth. CRM integrates data, technology, analysis, and marketing &
communication process across all customers touch point. It is a comprehensive strategy
and process of acquiring, retaining and partnering with customer to create superior value
for business and its customer. It is as an investment and the value of relationship
marketing is done through marketing accounting procedure over several years. The
importance of customer retention arises out of the fact acquiring customers is much more
expensive than keeping them.
^^ In life insurance industry, a decade ago, selling for insurance company is seemed
straight forward. But thing have changed and competition have taken a new face. Today
bank sell annuities, stock brokers sell life insurance. The line between financial services
providers have bluddred . Combined with the competition, challenging economic
condition have forced the insurance company to rethink how to do their business. To
survive in this competitive world, insurance companies can no longer operative under a
policy based model. Instead, they must adopt a new client centric approach to better meet
the needs of its customers.




The longer an insurance company can keep a customer, the more profitable that customer
become. Knowing what a customer needs and effectively responding to them is a great
way to boost their business and build a strong relationship with their client. Insurance
companies have a wealth of data and about their customer. But many companies lack the
ability to soft through that data and extract the information that is critical to make
important strategic and tactical business decision. Here arises the need for CRM.
Every insurer promises customer satisfaction, but to what extent this promise is being
translated into reality is the million dollar question. Some companies understand what
the customer wants, but they cannot or would not deliver it because their organization
structure and way of doing business prevent them from doing so. Many insurers remain
inflexible in traditional functional areas, such as underwriting, claims, marketing and loss
control. If insurers do not adapt to changing needs of the customer, they can not survive
and are sure to the victim of marketing myopia.
CRM is revolutionizing the financial services industry. It is the most valuable tool to
identify profitable customers and strengthen relationship with them. Selling policies to
new customers, through important, usually isnt a cost effective as keeping existing
customers. When a profitable relationship already exists, CRM can especially boost
superior services at a lower cost. Successful CRM should give insurer the ability to
measure customer value and improve the customers services perception while reducing
servicing cost. Ideally, smart CRM solution should automatically make intuitive
insurance connection and allow non-intuitive but relevant assured connection to be
created. CRRM can help / hurt the risk management process depending on how
effectively it is managed.
As companies engage in the battle to win over a larger share, of customers,
corporate interests in the concept of relationship marketing have grown dramatically. It
focus managing all interaction that an organization has with its customers, in order to
leverage the data in a variety of business application. While CRM is not a new process,
its evolution over the years has changed the way business are viewed and interacted with
their customer, to the point that many insurance executives are now discovering CRM to
be a valuable corporate assets one that can directly impact there bottom line.
Insurance provides traditionally concerned on product creation, with distribution
and sales considered a different business focus, and therefore customers relation was not
a key concern. But with the evolution of technology, customer are now demanding
multiple channel through which they can interact with their provides including face to
face contact, phone, website, e-mail, mobile devices etc. This has forced the insurance
company to explore new distribution channels, so that ordinal customers has more
information about multiple insurance products than ever before. The challenge to
insurance firm is therefore is to grow and sustain business by rapidly improving
operational efficiencies and providing tailor mode products for diverse group of
customers. Thus CRM in insurance is a novel way to beet the odds.
ICICI BANK: ICICI Bank Limited (ICICI Bank) is a trendsetter in the use of
banking technology in India. Since 1999, ICICI Bank leverages
comprehensive datacenter availability and data
protection solutions from Symantec. Using Veritas Storage
Foundation and Veritas Cluster Server, the bank is achieving
99.9 percent application availability and 99.99 percent
uptime for its server infrastructure. The bank relies on
Veritas NetBackup and a full range of agents and options for
data protection. The solution is delivering tangible results,
including a 50 percent reduction in the time to rebuild
corrupted servers and 25 percent annual growth in data
volume without any increase in staffing resources. Seeking
greater adaptability, the bank recently turned to Symantec
for an enterprise licensing agreement that lowered
software infrastructure costs by as much as 20 percent
CRM is an acronym for 'Customer Relationship Management'. CRM is a set of strategies, processes,
metrics, organizational culture and technology solutions that enhance an organization's ability to see the
differences in its customers and prospects' behavior and needs, track new opportunities to better serve
their customers and act, instantly and profitably, on those differences and opportunities. Recently CRM
has taken a center stage in the business world with businesses concentrating on saving money and
increasing profits by redefining internal processes and procedures. It costs a company dramatically less
to retain and grow an existing client, than it does to court new ones. It is said that 'It is seven times
more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one'therefore the value of customer
information and management should never be underestimated.
Customer relation management analysts says CRM is "a buzzword that's really not so new. What's new is
the technology is allowing us to do what we could do at the turn of the century with the neighborhood
grocer. He had few enough customers and enough brainpower to keep track of everyone's preferences.
Technology has allowed us to go back to the future to this model." The aim of CRM is optimize the use of
technology and human resources for the business to gain insight into the behavior of costumer. Seeing
the new market (CRM) emerge, the worlds leading business software vendors have reinvented
themselves to focus on CRM, and there has been a fierce competition for the dominance in this market.
Technology is now an essential part of CRM nowadays but buying technology before defining CRM
business goals, is a recipe for disaster. It is important to remember that technology used for CRM should
be tailor made depending on the type of consumer base of the company and the business goals.
Companies need to understand CRM in relevance to customers and customers only. Technology like call
center services and softwares will prove helpful only if they improve the customer services and
relation, otherwise all fancy technology is useless if it fails to benefit the customer. The CRM services
consist of the following major segments:
Consulting services
Implementation services
CRM Outsourcing services
Training services
There are various technical components of CRM like customer information, sales, marketing trends and
marketing efficacy that act in tandem to improve relationship between companies and consumers. From a
technological perspective, it involves capturing customer data from across the organization and
consolidating all internally and externally acquired customer-related data in a central database. This data
is then analyzed and the results of the analysis are distributed via customer touch points like mobile sales
force, inbound and outbound call centers, web sites, point-of-sale, email, etc., for use while dealing with
customers at these very touch points. The Internet has revolutionized the way business is done and has
virtually taken the enterprise information system within the reach of the customer. It can be accessed
through the call centers, through the Internet and increasingly through mobile devices.
It has been predicted that the total worldwide market for CRM services will grow to US$ 125.2 billion by
2004. With a vast talent pool India is fast becoming an important development base of major CRM
companies. Indian companies and other institutions that offer jobs are jumping into the CRM bandwagon
to seize a chunk of the global market, both products as well as services Call centers, catering primarily
to the American and European markets are coming up in and around the metros. With the easing of
infrastructure constraints, India is likely to emerge as a significant player in this segment. India even has
a CRM Foundation in New Delhi, founded with the purpose of assessing and improving CRM practices.
Although many Indian call centers have come up that cater to international market, there are only a few
Indian companies that have actively taken up CRM. The CRM enabled companies include Tata Telecom,
TVS Electronics, HP India, Tata Infotech, Carrier Refrigeration, Tata Teleservices, Satyam Infoway, Planet
M, and Epicenter Technologies among many others. Recently some of the mobile phone companies in
India have started to integrate CRM services to increase the consumer satisfaction. For the big mobile
operators, customer care is becoming the differentiator. Other sectors like Banking and Insurance
services are also deploying CRM solutions. ICICI bank and ICICI prudential (insurance) along with several
other large banking and insurance companies are adopting CRM solutions.
Vendors and analysts agree that the need to acquire, retain and support customers will stimulate greater
investment in CRM. Like all other IT enabled services, CRM is likely to grow at a rapid pace in India
during the next few years.
Hosted CRM an emerging paradigm in customer relation management
(By -Geetanjali Saxena)
Page 1; Page 2
Hosted CRM offerings started to appear more than four years ago, but in last one year the market for
hosted CRM have really taken off. According to a recently released Beagle Research Group study, the
demand for hosted CRM has exploded over the past 12 months, and mainstream users are now adopting
these solutions. However, the latest Beagle Research survey on hosted CRM found that a nearly equal
number of respondents opposed and embraced the concept of hosted CRM. Hosted CRM market in 2005
is expected to be $724.5 million in 2005. That's a slim percentage of the $27.8 billion in total CRM
spending that Aberdeen forecasts for 2005, with $7.7 billion spent on applications and the rest coming
from integration services and related hardware. Forrester Research predicts that the percentage of
overall CRM revenues coming from hosted applications will stand at 13 percent by 2005, up from 7
percent in 2002. Gartner Inc. estimates that by 2009, 33 percent of all small to medium businesses
(SMBs) will have chosen a hosted model.
When hosted offerings first came on the market, they were considered ideal for SMBs. But in the recent
years vendors of hosted offerings are increasingly able to offer more areas of customization, and changes
can typically be implemented by a business administrator taking advantage of various offerings built-in
wizards, tools and configuration options. So, not only SMBs but also many large companies like Hewlett-
Packard, Xerox, Sanmina-SCI, AOL Time Warner and Fujitsu Computer Products of America are among
those with units relying on a hosted CRM service.
Initially ASPs (application service providers), Salesfoce.com and UpShot were the leading players in the
emerging market of hosted CRM. Siebel validated the ASP model by acquiring UpShot. The success of the
ASPs has prompted nearly every CRM vendor, including those with products targeted at the market's high
end, to make available hosted versions of their software, often through partnerships with channel
resellers. KANA has jumped into the hosted CRM badwagon with the release of an on-demand variant of
KANA Response Live. RightNow Technologies - RightNow 7.0 is available in both hosted and on-site
versions. Entellium offers Entellium eSalesForce and Entellium eCustomerCenter, its sales and customer
service products, respectively, as well as MyEntellium, a business intelligence and team collaboration
portal. The products are available as individual modules or integrated suite. PeopleSoft provides,
PeopleSoft Enterprise One and PeopleSoft World - through hosted-services. Both products offer CRM,
supply chain, financials and human-capital management. Microsoft doesn't have a hosted CRM offering of
its own but does offer the service via some 90 certified partners. Microsoft CRM doesn't require a client-
side installation, said Alex Simons, who leads the Microsoft CRM product team. Customers can run a copy
of it on a server and configure it to be accessed by end users either through Microsoft Outlook, or
through a Web browser. (contd.)
Advantages of Hosted CRM -
Relatively low startup costs: Hosted CRM is cost effective (at least initially).
Rapid deployment: No hardware or software to purchase.
Few IT resources: No IT maintenance or staffing. Many companies want to stay
focused on core operations keeping the internal IT management needs of the
company to minimum.
Ease to use and deep-enough functionality.
Easy Upgrading: The ease with which upgrades are rolled out is another benefit of
hosted offerings: Theyre automatically performed centrally, obviating the need for
an IT staff to distribute upgrades to individual desktops or portable devices.
Hosted CRM also help in broader integration opportunities afforded by evolving Web-
services.
Provide a platform for mobile CRM- Sales personal can log on to important CRM data
in field, from any place that has Internet connectivity.
Disadvantages of hosted CRM
One of the advantages licensed CRM has held over hosted CRM is its purported ease
of customization and integration. SalesNet's dashboard and Salesforce.com
application server are allowing customization in hosted services.
CRM ASPs faced doubts about their security and stability: Customers were reluctant
to trust crucial corporate data to an outside vendor. But the vendors have done a
good job of building robust infrastructures and allaying those worries. Previous fears
associated with hosted solutions have been minimize through security capabilities
like firewalls, through security capabilities like firewalls
Regarding the cost of hosted CRM, analyst suggests that companies that engage an
ASP are perhaps overawed by the low initial price tag without considering the
necessary ongoing costs they may incur as the relationship period extends. Setup
costs; license conversions; fees for customers or business partners; costs of
reducing users; selecting the appropriate pricing metrics; arranging residual rights;
training fees; data-ownership issues; integration and customization; and termination
fees are often overlooked by the users of the hosted CRM and these can over a
period of time tend to increase theultimate cost of hosted CRM. Some vendors don't
agree that any of these expenses is a surprise. "All the costs are visible," says Dan
Starr, CMO of Salesnet, which provides on-demand CRM.
Hosted CRM vs In House Software

ASP/Hosted CRM In House Software
Cost Initial Investment is low Less cost in long term use (after three years)
Flexibility Easier to customize, but has limited options More flexibility, but easier to over customize
Man Power
Usually requires just one business
administrator
Requires business and IT staff
Overall Easier to manage More control over the applications
Where and for whom Hosted CRM is really beneficial
If an organization has complex business processes to automate, it may make more sense to
run CRM products in-house, she continues. The customization you can do with hosted
offerings is limited to some extent. In any case, if more difficult coding are needed, the
company would require the services of a skilled programmer. If youre a large company
where IT is a key competitive differentiator, its more likely that youve got IT workers with
sophisticated and multifaceted skill sets who can handle the integration work and custom
programming needed to achieve return of investment (ROI) from an in-house CRM
implementation. However, for a mid-market or smaller company with little or no IT staff,
will be probably better served by outsourcing customer-related processes to an ASP. The
provider handles upgrades and support, and offers easy-to-use tools for some
customization. Similarly if an organization has a widely distributed workforce, whether it be
because of mobility requirements or due to geographically dispersed offices, an outsourced
model can make a lot of sense, as users can use a browser to log-in to applications.
We value our relationship
with Symantec. ICICI Bank
looks forward to working with
Symantec to help drive their
product roadmap so they can
continue to accommodate the
special needs of banks lik

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