CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGMENT

Introduction
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the customer-focused business strategy which is not a new concept. Although CRM is more about the customer, it cannot be successful by this definition alone. CRM should be performed in organizations as the combination of three main concepts: people, processes, and technology. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a combination of people, processes, and technology that seeks to provide understanding of customer needs, to support a business strategy, and to build long-term relationships with customers. To increase relationships with all customers the integration of these three is essential. Applying CRMs system in one organization means a change in different areas of the business and seeks a proper balance of people, processes, and technology. One of the main reasons of CRM failures is considering technology as the main part of the system. CRM project success will happen if the CRM users investigate people, process, and technologyeither one by one or together. The goals of CRM are: Building long-term and profitable relationships with chosen customers, Getting closer to those customers at every point of contact with them

Top management
Top management commitment is more essential than CEO attention to the CRM project. This view was reinforced in a recent META Group Report (1998) that singled out top management support and involvement as a key success factor for CRM implementations. Customer-centric management requires top management support and commitment to CRM throughout the entire CRM implementation. Moreover, top management should provide the stage in CRM initiatives for leadership, strategic direction, and alignment of vision and business goals. Also warns against starting a CRM project if senior management does not fundamentally believe in re-engineering a customer-centric business model. Top management must show its commitment to development of company education and training programs, and also enhancing employee skills and knowledge. Furthermore, it should be noted that education increases motivation and commitment of employee and reduces employee disagreements. In addition to these, different reward programs such as compensation programs and reward systems for

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employees should be considered by management. CRM projects require absolute attention of all members of the organizational departments such as sales, marketing, manufacturing, customer services, information technology, etc. Top management and marketing and sales management are generally the initiators of a corporate CRM project. In addition, project teams require not only sponsorship by top management but also a project champion that can persuade top management for continuous efforts to change.

People
The people component is the most difficult one in order to adjust employees/staffs to the changes. Those users, who do not have an understanding of the reasons for the changes, usually oppose that change. CRM initiatives require vision and each and every employee must understand the purpose and changes that CRM will bring. CRM success will be in danger by negative feedback. Implementation of enterprise technology, such as CRM and ERP, requires changes to organizational culture. While both technology and business processes are crucial to successful CRM initiatives, the attention is back on individual employees who are the basis of the customer relationship. Along several important elements regarding to management and employee team that successful CRM system requires, top management commitment plays the main role

Process
The process component of CRM is the most delicate one because inappropriate process is the same as continuing your work aimlessly. When the company aims to create an effective process change, first of all it seeks to know the function of existing customer-facing business processes. Then the company needs to redesign or replace the process with ones that have been created and/or agreed upon internally. As an example, the replacement or updating of the business processes happens for most companies that have the process of direct contact with the customers during the purchase, payment, and usage of the company's products and services. CRM as a combination of business processes and technology that seeks to understand a companys customer from the perspective of who they are, what they do, and what they are like. It should be considered that companies have been repeatedly warned that failure is eminent if they believe that CRM is only a technology solution.

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The shortage of customer- facing process will not compensate by purchasing CRM software, the solution is agreeing internally on how users would like a process to be done. In fact, CRM as an integrated approach to managing customer relationships with re-engineering of customer value through better service recovery and competitive positioning of the offer. The goals of a customer-centric model are to increase revenue, promote customer loyalty, reduce the cost of sales and service, and improve operations. E mphasized that optimizing customer relationships requires a complete understanding of all customers; profitable as well as non-profitable, and then to organize business processes to treat customers individually based on their needs and their values, Identify, customize, interact, differenciate.

Technology
The technology component is the toughest one, because there are a lot of technology offerings and alternatives. There are two issues related to technology: dealing with CRM software vendors and staying on top of CRM technology trends. CRM is a strategy that puts together a combination of Information Technology (IT) with business processes and services such as Data Warehouse Technology and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Technology Information Technology Whereas CRM collect and analyze data on customer patterns and also deliver customer data by accumulating, storing, maintaining, and distributing customer knowledge throughout the organization, CRM takes so much advantage of different dimensions of technology. Technology innovations have the ability of interpreting customer behavior, developing predictive models, responding with timely and effective customized communications, and delivering product and service value to individual customers. Using technology to optimize interactions with customers, companies can create a 360 degree view of customers to learn from past interactions to optimize future ones . Information Technology (IT) has long been recognized as an enabler to radically redesign business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements in organizational performance. IT assists with the re-design of a business process by facilitating changes to work practices and establishing innovative methods to link a company with customers, suppliers and internal stakeholders. Innovations in network infrastructure, client/server computing, and

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business intelligence applications are the main elements in CRM development. In CRM, an effective management of information has an efficient role. Information is critical for product tailoring, service innovation, consolidated views of customers, and calculating customer lifetime value. Among others, data warehouses, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are main infrastructures to CRM implementations

Data Warehouse Technology

Data warehouse is the most popular and most needed of systems for providing CRM operating systems such as HR, sales and transaction processing, financial, inventory, purchasing and marketing. Specifically, data warehouses extract, clean, transform, and manage large volumes of data from multiple, heterogeneous systems, creating a historical record of all customer interactions. Constantly extracting knowledge about customers reduces the need for traditional marketing research tools such as customer surveys and focus groups. Thus, it is possible to identify and report by product or service, geographic region, distribution channel, customer group, and individual customer. Data warehouse causes instant access to information throughout the organization and also makes CRM possible because it consolidates, correlates, and transforms customer data into customer intelligence that can used to form a better understanding of customer behavior. Customer data includes all sales, promotions, and customer service activities. In addition to transaction details, information related to billing and account status, customer service interactions, back orders, product shipment, product returns, claims history, and internal operating costs can improve understanding of customers and their purchasing patterns too. A brief outline of organizational benefits with a data warehouse is
Accurate and faster access to information to facilitate responses to customer questions;

Data quality and filtering to eliminate bad and duplicate data; Extract, manipulate and drill-down data quickly for profitability analysis, customer profiling, and retention modelling;
Advanced data consolidation and data analysis tools for higher level summary as well as

detailed reports; and

Calculate total present value and estimate future value of each andevery customer

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Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Technology
The implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) produces an improvement in the quality and efficiency of business processes. However, when the majority of companies in a sector have optimised their internal processes, this improvement becomes a condition that is necessary to remain in the market, but ceases to be a competitive advantage. Successful ERP links all areas of a company. The management, manufacturing, human resources, financial systems and distribution will connect to external suppliers and customers into a tightly integrated system with shared data and visibility. Organizations with successful ERP marketing, are preparing themselves for creating a good relationship with CRM or taking over other software companies that have been operating in the CRM market. ERP technology and CRM applications have significant differences. CRM applications are web-enabled and designed to extend the data mining capabilities of ERP throughout the supply chain to customers, distributors, and manufacturers. Organizations can use CRM analytical capabilities to predict and answer key business questions on customer intelligence and share the results across channels. Although ERP is not required for CRM, providing customers, suppliers, and employees with web-based access to systems through CRM will only be beneficial if the underlying infrastructure, such as data warehouses and/or ERP, exists. Companies with an ERP system, however, need to understand where they are in the implementation process, as well as assess where other technologies, such as data warehouses, fit in before plunging into CRM applications.

Conclusion
CRM requires a customer-centric business environment to support effective marketing, sales, and service processes. Many firms have switched from a product-centric to a customercentric culture, which emphasizes the whole customer experience. Investigating CRM elements (people, process, and technology) one by one and together shows their high value in managing a proper customer relationship. The main business drives of CRM are increasing customer lifetimes, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. The main obstacles to becoming customercentric are poor performances in some areas. In addition to these, the method used here is personal opinion; the article believes that re-engineering a customer-focus business model in organizations needs the integrating of the main parts of each element, mixing of the related

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activities, and eliminating of those which do not add any value to organization and customers. Moreover, successful implementation of CRM means significant changes in some jobs, so it seeks the instant adjustment of employees with those cultural changes which create by CRM implementation. References: 1.Customer Relationship Management. A Strategic Perspective by G. Shainesh & Jagdish n Sheth, Macmillan India ltd.,2006. 2..Knowledge Management, Bharathidasan University, centre for distance education materials. 3.Revitalising Global Business, Conference, Annamalai University, Chidambaram 4..Customer Relationship Management, Jill dyche Pearson Education, New Delhi Prepared by: G. AROCKIA RAJ. Research shcoloar P.G. Assistant in Commerce Little Flower Higher Secondary School Kumbakonam