CRM Interview ,Define CRM,Customer Relationship Management

CRM Interview ,Define CRM,Customer Relationship Management
CRM is a process or methodology used to learn more about customer’s needs & behavior in order to develop stronger relationship with them.
Definition of CRM given by different authors:
Craig Conway
Every time a customer approaches your business, they arrive with an expectation. It may be a service need or a new product interest, but in every case, they have an expectation that accompanies their interest in your business. What happens next will form an experience that shapes their behavior. A good experience may increase their loyalty and tendency to purchase again. A poor experience may transfer their business to your competitor. The ability to recognize this process and to actively manage it forms the basis for Customer Relationship Management, or CRM.
The ability to ensure that the enterprise will act with unity of purpose to ensure experiences that exceed every expectation is a monumental task. Customers interacting with employees, employees collaborating with suppliers—every interaction is an opportunity to manage a relationship.
Scott Fletcher
CRM is an enterprise-wide mindset, mantra, and set of business processes and policies that are designed to acquire, retain, and service customers. Broadly speaking, CRM includes the customer facing business processes of marketing, sales, and customer service.
Advances in technology serve as the primary catalyst to the CRM bonanza. The rise of the Internet as a means to transact business, increasing and affordable bandwidth, and advances in computing power are all driving CRM. These technology advances greatly empower customers and position them to more easily access information on products, services, and competitors.
Brent Frei
CRM is a comprehensive set of processes and technologies for managing the relationships with potential and current customers and business partners across marketing, sales, and service regardless of the communication channel.
The goal of CRM is to optimize customer and partner satisfaction, revenue, and business efficiency by building the strongest possible relationships at an organizational level.
Business objectives: outlining two- to five-year strategic goals should be clearly defined. These can include revenue, market share, and margin goals. These should then drive the next level of business fundamentals: program initiatives.
Program initiatives: are typically one to one and a half years in scope. They are the near-term game plans intended to move the company another step toward the long-term objectives of the company. These initiatives are then associated with specific measurements that will be the clear indications of successful forward progress.
Departmental plans: are the processes and behavior that form the fabric of everyday work within the organization. Examples include deploying an automated email response system, enabling customer self-help on a website, or streamlining the call center processes to answer customer inquiries in shorter time frames. There are often dozens of major processes within a department and many that cross departments. The three layers of business operations are then supported by technology.
Technology: is used to automate and enable some or all of the business processes and initiatives. Organizations use either many separate best-of-breed solutions or larger, integrated platform solutions to achieve the goals of technology-enabled business. The technology strategy is generally a reflection of the coordination, or lack thereof, of the organization.
Ronni T. Marshak
Every company’s game plan includes what I call the “G-SPOT.” (See Figure 1-2.) This stands for Goals, Strategies, Plans, Objectives, and Tactics. Here’s how it breaks down for CRM:
Goals: Every business has clearly defined goals. At the most basic level, these include things like profitability, worldwide recognition, and high stockholder value.
Strategies: To achieve your goals, you establish strategies, such as designing innovative products, focusing on international markets, and establishing long-term relationships with customers.
Plans: Executing strategies require plans. For example, to design innovative products you might implement a plan of hiring top product engineers; to focus internationally you might develop a public relations plan that targets worldwide press; and to establish customer relationships you might determine to measure customer satisfaction and behavior and to invest in technology to support customer interactions.
Objectives: These are the measurable goals of each plan, such as maintaining a 60 percent customer retention rate or lowering product return rates to less than 20 percent.
Tactics: Tactics are how you achieve the objectives that are part of the plans to implement the strategies to achieve the goals (whew!). For example, you might establish 24/7 call center or create a data warehouse that consolidates all customer information.