In the late 1960s, in his seminal article on marketing, management guru Ted Levitt suggested that the purpose of a business was to "Create and Keep a Customer". He advocated that the modern firm should view “the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs”. Over two generations later, businesses are beginning to wake up to this reality.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is now being actively considered by organisations across the globe, parading itself in the open market disguised as new technology and software applications. However behind this camouflage of expensive technology and fancy software packages sits the deeply embedded business concept that suggests that knowing, understanding and serving the customer should be at the core of what organisations do best.
So what is CRM? And what are the real benefits for your company? Building sustainable and successful relationships with a large customer base is not the easiest thing to do and will have a direct impact on many core operational processes from product development to debt recovery. It is not purely a technical issue. It is not only about software implementation. And it is not just about sales. It is about the interactions of the entire business with your customers.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is now being actively considered by organisations across the globe, parading itself in the open market disguised as new technology and software applications. However behind this camouflage of expensive technology and fancy software packages sits the deeply embedded business concept that suggests that knowing, understanding and serving the customer should be at the core of what organisations do best.
So what is CRM? And what are the real benefits for your company? Building sustainable and successful relationships with a large customer base is not the easiest thing to do and will have a direct impact on many core operational processes from product development to debt recovery. It is not purely a technical issue. It is not only about software implementation. And it is not just about sales. It is about the interactions of the entire business with your customers.