Operational

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including

sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally add
ed to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on custom
ers from the database when necessary. Front office is an integrated CRM software
. ... For the magazine, see Marketing (magazine). ...

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact
with different people or different contact channels in a company over time witho
ut having to describe the history of their interaction each time.

Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their c
all center agents. A very large collections call centre in Lakeland, FL. A call
centre or call center (see spelling differences) is a centralised office used fo
r the purpose of receiving and transmitting a large volume of requests by teleph
one. ...

Operational CRM process customer data for a variety of purposes:

Managing Campaigns
Enterprise Marketing Automation
Sales Force Automation
Collaborative
Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of
different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be
through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone (Automa
ted Voice Response AVR) or SMS.

The objectives of collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and s
ervice improvements.

Analytical
Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:
Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimise marketing effec
tiveness
Design and execution of specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisit
ion, cross-selling, up-selling, retention
Analysis of customer behavior to aid product and service decision making (e.g. p
ricing, new product development etc.)
Management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability anal
ysis
Prediction of the probability of customer defection (churn analysis).
Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics. Marketing Effe
ctiveness is the function of improving how marketers go to market with the goal
of optimizing their marketing spend to achieve even better results for both the
short-term and long-term. ... Cross-selling is the strategy of pushing new produ
cts to current customers based on their past purchases. ... Up-selling is a sale
s technique, where a salesman attempts to have the consumer purchase more expens
ive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a better sale. ... I
nstance of retaining (e. ... Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of techn
iques from statistics and data mining that process current and historical data i
n order to make “predictions” about future events. ...

The latest CRM functionalities

The latest CRM should incorporate features that extend the CRM functionality bey
ond sales, marketing, and customer support.

Some features are

• Superior user interface
• Support for Web Services
• A framework, which should support integration with popular accounting systems.
• Support e-mail client integration and advanced email support
• Support perforce integration
• Features to make the engine to support automated business rules, email support a
nd alerts etc
• Supports customization of UI,TOOLS,REPORTS,TEMPLATES etc.
• Should be WEB and WAP enabled.
• Zero footprint web browser€: the CRM should be web based and operate from your bro
wser. You can access the application just as you would access a web site like am
azon.com. There must not be any requirement of writing code at the client’s end or
any requirement to download a plug-in or an applet. Standard browser access is
a must should support open technologies like http/xml which provides all the fun
ctionality.
• All modules should be inherently integrated with each other. The complete breadt
h of crm functions spanning sales, marketing, customer support, employee support
, partner management, defect tracking and customer portal applications must be i
ntegrated by design.
• The product should support database like oracle, ms sql server and sybase. A sin
gle repository should hold all the data generated across various customer touch
points.
• If the modules are pre-integrated then you have the flexibility to start with wh
at you need and activate the rest when you need them.
Should be release independent so that the customizations done at installation an
d over the years are preserved when you upgrade. There is no need to rework them