Customer Relationship Management Customer relationship management involves large expenditures.

How important is this exercise for small, medium and large business enterprises? Is the effect of CRM evident in the company balance sheets? How can such large expenditure be justified to the company shareholders? Submissions to Prof. P. Guha should be computer printed hard copies in plastic folders with name and enrolment number conspicuously entered on the front page on or before 25 March 2012.

SMALL BUSINESS ENTERPRISES

CRM has always been the domain of big business. But now it is important for small enterprises as well. Managing customer relationships is key to current and future success. Unfortunately, as a business grows or as more salespeople are hired, customer relationships can suffer. After all, while you have more customers, you dont have the detailed knowledge or understanding of each one like you did when you had fewer customers. Previously the domain of large business, CRM is now a must for small and medium businesses wishing to grow steadily and predictably. The ability to understand product and services demand, to weed out unprofitable sales efforts and customers, to capitalize on emerging trends, and to market more intelligently, is important to small and medium businesses. Why? More revenue, faster. It is that simple. Here are ten reasons why your small and medium business needs CRM, right now: 1. Generate More Leads: Pretty simple. You can turn information into leads by understanding conversations and uncovering needs that you can fill. 2. Qualify Prospects Faster: Its what you and your salespeople are struggling with, right? To quickly evaluate contacts and leads and uncover needs or issues you can sell into. Stop wasting time where you have no chance of success. 3. Close More Deals: A key to growth more deals more often! Because you actively manage the sales process and have unique insight into customer needs, your sales team will increase its success at closing more deals. 4. Higher Average Invoice/Deal Size: Getting more dollars every time you sell. Through customer and product/service insight your business will be in the unique position of being able to more effectively cross and upsell your products/services. 5. Margin Preservation: Virtually eliminate discounting or leaving dollars on the table. Each sales engagement and customer can be evaluated to discover nuances and needs that allow you to solidly position and defend your value and price. 6. Improved Customer Service: Having the right relationships, processes, and capabilities ensure that you can capture and resolve small issues before they become big ones. 7. Tighter Customer Loyalty: Through closer relationships, better customer service, and anticipating needs, your customers will choose to do more business with you, more often. 8. Business Customer Continuity: An historical customer relationship memory is always retained in the business, should salespeople leave or be replaced within the company. And new salespeople get up to speed more quickly, minimizing customer relationship or service interruptions. 9. Increased Marketing ROI: Quit throwing good money after bad. Youll know how each marketing piece, campaign, or promotional item from placement to revenue contributes to the business. 10. Profitability: This is what really counts more profit to your business. The business becomes more intelligent when it comes to the most important and expensive drivers sales, marketing, and customer management. Get in control of all three,driving new levels of profit to your business.

MEDIUM BUSINESS ENTERPRISE Achieving customer satisfaction is closely related to the achievement of the objectives of quality management, in particular the achievement of enterprise excellence. Modern understanding of the concept of quality includes not only its technological base, but the concept of quality of production is transferred to the executive management level, where, speaking in the long terms gets the characteristics of improving the quality of enterprise of the company as a whole, while consumers and achieving of the customer satisfaction have a central place. CRM is a strategy for identifying and meeting customer's needs and behavior, doing so results in a stronger relationship with them. Greenberg defines CRM as (Greenberg, 2004): "the obligation of companies to put customer's experience at the center of its priorities and to provide incentive of the systems, processes and sources of information of power by upgrading relations obtained from experience." CRM (Urbanskiene, Daiva, & Chreptaviiene, 2008) is seen as chain reaction, which is caused by new strategic initiatives of communication with a customer when high level of information technologies development and constant customers need to get better quality of service are achieved. Small companies which compete to gain advantage in the market are constantly looking for ways to out-compete their competitors. As rapid improvements in technology lead to a greater transparency of marketing activities, the greater the challenge to achieve long-term differentiation is. Successful CRM is one of the competitive advantages that companies can use to keep users and prevent their transfer to other competitors. Such marketing area is being developed with emphasis on activities that enhance the transaction aimed at building and maintaining profitable relationships. CRM is actively creating and maintaining long term relationships with customers that are supported with the use of appropriate technology. It is a process designed to gather data about users, their characteristics and to use these qualities for certain marketing activities. Knowing each user based on possession of relevant information, analytical functions and data mining techniques, small enterprise is enabled to gain insight into the properties and to deliver products and services that help keep users and enhance their loyalty. CRM enables organizations to create greater value for users through better communication, faster delivery and personalized products and services (Chen and Popovich, 2003). Improved relationship with customers can lead to greater customer loyalty and retention and eventually profitability. Furthermore, the rapid development of Internet and its technology has greatly increased opportunities for marketing and transformed the way in which relationships take place between companies and their customers. Five different kinds of relationships that can be built with the consumers that buy products and services of the organization can be distinguished (Kotler & Keller, 2006): The basic relations. Vendors of the organizations sell products and services to customers, but do not follow in any way response and satisfaction of consumers. Reactive relations. Vendors sell products and services and encourage consumers to call them whenever they have any questions or problems. Responsible relationships. Vendors call consumers by phone immediately after the sale to check whether the product meets their expectations. Vendors also are asking customers to give suggestions to improve products or to impart specific objections. Such information can help companies to continuously improve their offer.

Proactive relations. Vendors or other organizations marketers occasionally occur to consumers by phone, or in other ways, with suggestions on improving the use of the product, or with information about the benefits of new products.

LARGE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy implemented by some companies to research and understand their customers or potential clients. Typically, software is used to automate the CRM services. When a big business incorporates this strategy and technology, they can increase customer satisfaction, retain customers and reduce operational costs. This is especially useful for large companies who may be somewhat disconnected from their customers Customer Satisfaction By implementing CRM strategies, the company can focus on improving customer satisfaction through examination of customer preferences, demographics and interests. This information may be collected through automated surveys or personal phone calls from customer service representatives. Customer research may be performed to discover the reasons why one product is more popular than another. Customers typically enjoy the attention they receive and the interest in their happiness and satisfaction with the product, and the data that is collected can help the company produce better products and services in the future, contributing to improved customer satisfaction. This also improves customer retention over the long run. Marketing The data that is collected through customer research can provide ideas for marketing and advertising for a big business. With many products or services to market, a large company may have difficulty targeting different customers for each item. However, customer research will provide information about what the customer likes about the product, what they are looking for in future products, and what purpose they would like the product to serve. All of this information provides great content for print or commercial advertisements and packaging designs for each product. Lowered Costs By automating customer service with CRM software, the company can easily gain customer research through online or telephone surveys. The software automatically formats and calculates the data, making it faster and easier to collect this information. Fewer customer service representatives will be needed for collecting this information and less time will be spent preparing reports on customer research. Another advantage is word-of-mouth advertising from satisfied customers; as CRM strategies make customers happier, they become more likely to bring in new customers through word-of-mouth, which lowers the cost of finding a new customer. Brand Image

As customer satisfaction and retention improves, the corporation's brand image may begin to improve as well. Customers will begin to associate the brand with good customer service, quality products and a personable approach. The CRM strategy's focus on the customer will let each buyer know that their input is valued by the company. This can attract more customers and continue to create loyal customers to the brand.

JUSTIFYING CRM to SHAREHOLDERS Purchasing and installing technology or software is expensive, not only in terms of the initial purchase price but also in the context of installation, training and adoption, all of which implies financial and time costs that your business and your sales force may struggle to find. However, CRM software can make an enormous difference in the productivity and reach of your sales force, a difference that can and should - result in a revenue increase exponentially higher than the time and money invested in the solution. Making more money Sales revenue depends upon the sales efforts of your sales force. Even if your product range, company reputation and marketing campaigns are top notch, a mediocre sales team performance will impede the ability of your business to maximise revenues. CRM software has the ability to centralise customer data and to assist your sales force in their day to day tasks. Centralised client data offers the benefit of easy access to a customer's complete profile, so for a sales rep it becomes far easier to provide a customer with informed advice. Knowing what a customer has purchased before and reading previous comments on the customer's profile is of enormous benefit. There is also the significant advantage of calendaring, appointment management and reminder functions, all of which ensures that your sales representatives make the best possible use of their working hours. Administration and back office activities may be vital to the sales process but it is face to face selling time that drives the numbers. CRM minimises administration, freeing your sales force to do what they do best - sell. The centralised database that a CRM solution maintains also makes it far easier to accurately and effectively market to existing and prospective clients, again maximising your return on marketing investment. Saving time and money Efficiency is the word when it comes to CRM systems. A decent CRM implementation makes the process of taking orders, fulfilling orders and providing

support a seamless process, doing away with the vast majority of manual, repetitive and time consuming tasks. For example, if a customer calls your sales office a sales rep can immediately pull up the customer's details and order history. The sales rep will then be able to add a new order without re-entering all the customer data. The order will be sent to the fulfilment team which, in turn, will have all the delivery details at hand. Should the customer call for support at a later stage, the support team will already have access to the order details. Quantify the benefits Calculating an exact figure as to how much your business should gain on the installation of a CRM system is far from simple but study after study has shown that it is not uncommon for companies to experience a return on investment (ROI) of ten times as much as the cost of the system implementation. It is important, however, to work with a CRM solution provider. that has a good reputation for selecting the right solution and for implementing it in the optimal way. No two businesses are identical and there are many factors that must be accommodated in ensuring the best possible fit to the business. Finally, CRM systems are by no means as expensive as they are perceived to be. Online software as a service (SaaS) solutions start at tens of pounds per user per month so there really is no reason for any business that relies on a sales force to not seriously investigate the use of CRM software.