Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive approach for creating, maintaining and expanding customer relationships.
Frederick Reichhold and Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School shows, most customers are only profitable in the second year that they do business with you. That’s right. Initially, new customers cost you money—money spent on advertising and marketing and money spent learning what they want and teaching them how best to do business with you.
CRM does not belong just to sales and marketing. It is not the sole responsibility of the customer service group. Nor is it the brainchild of the information technology team. While any one of these areas may be the internal champion for CRM in your organization, in point of fact, CRM must be a way of doing business that touches all areas. When CRM is delegated to one area of an organization, such as IT, customer relationships will suffer. Likewise, when an area is left out of CRM planning, the organization puts at risk the very customer relationships it seeks to maintain.
Are you a manager whose area doesn’t deal with external customers? This part of the definition still applies. First, you and your team support and add value to the individuals in your organization who do come into direct contact with customers. Again and again, the research has proven that external customer satisfaction. faction is directly proportional to employee satisfaction.
That means that the quality of support given to internal customers predicts the quality of support that is given to external customers. Second, consider your internal customers as advocates for your department or area. For you and your team, CRM is about growing advocates and finding newways to add value.