Customer Relationship Management (1)
Customer Relationship Management
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a hot key word in late 1990s. It seemed to be a holy grail to improve customer satisfaction, strengthen customer royalty, and more than everything else, create more profit for its owner. This blog entry is not a rocket science. You probably have read 100 other entries about CRM. Here is my point of view.
Good old CRM
Customer/seller relationship is probably created along human race. Even though the first customer and seller do not exchange goods, services using money. In the stone age, it's called barter system. So before the creation of CRM, how did we do it? I couldn't speak for the people in stone age. But I could elaborate things that I've seen while growing up in a Chinese family. Old CRM for old Chinese businessmen is 'good customer service'. What constitutes good customer service?
Good customer service in the old days is serve the best you can to customer's needs without jeopardizing your own company. For example, during an incident (problem with a product), seller listens to customer and tries to compromise in a timely manner. Seller may loan an equipment to let customer continue to operate. What about the time between incidents? Seller could simply call the customer to ask a few questions about satisfaction and probably request a visit.
Back then, customers weren't too many. Salesperson does not move frequently. So contact management is very simple, remember. Name/phone numbers were written down. All seemed to go well. Even large corporations, Rolodex is used to keep name cards (until today). Each salesperson keep their own customer lists (name cards). No centralized Rolodex is known to exist. When the big boss wants to contact a big customer, he simply asks his secretary to make an appointment, the secretary calls a salesperson to get this customer's contact.
New era CRM
Since companies tend to serve more customers and salespeople change jobs as frequently as they change shoes. Contact management alone became hard. If a salesperson is leaving, his manager must ask all namecards to be kept in the company. However, this may not be the case. So some salespeople even took customer information (this move is now illegal in several countries) with them. To solve this problem - Centralized Contact Management was created.
Centralized Contact Management (CCM) was first to be created utilizing Computer Technology. Years ago, I've seen large Thai conglomerate keeping all of their customer contact information in Lotus 1-2-3. They later consolidated all contacts in an Ashton-Tate dBase III.
Later on, IT professionals try to move Salesperson's notebook to become CRM database since Customer Information was already in Electronic format by late 1980s.
More on this later. Continue on CRM (2) ..
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a hot key word in late 1990s. It seemed to be a holy grail to improve customer satisfaction, strengthen customer royalty, and more than everything else, create more profit for its owner. This blog entry is not a rocket science. You probably have read 100 other entries about CRM. Here is my point of view.
Good old CRM
Customer/seller relationship is probably created along human race. Even though the first customer and seller do not exchange goods, services using money. In the stone age, it's called barter system. So before the creation of CRM, how did we do it? I couldn't speak for the people in stone age. But I could elaborate things that I've seen while growing up in a Chinese family. Old CRM for old Chinese businessmen is 'good customer service'. What constitutes good customer service?
Good customer service in the old days is serve the best you can to customer's needs without jeopardizing your own company. For example, during an incident (problem with a product), seller listens to customer and tries to compromise in a timely manner. Seller may loan an equipment to let customer continue to operate. What about the time between incidents? Seller could simply call the customer to ask a few questions about satisfaction and probably request a visit.
Back then, customers weren't too many. Salesperson does not move frequently. So contact management is very simple, remember. Name/phone numbers were written down. All seemed to go well. Even large corporations, Rolodex is used to keep name cards (until today). Each salesperson keep their own customer lists (name cards). No centralized Rolodex is known to exist. When the big boss wants to contact a big customer, he simply asks his secretary to make an appointment, the secretary calls a salesperson to get this customer's contact.
New era CRM
Since companies tend to serve more customers and salespeople change jobs as frequently as they change shoes. Contact management alone became hard. If a salesperson is leaving, his manager must ask all namecards to be kept in the company. However, this may not be the case. So some salespeople even took customer information (this move is now illegal in several countries) with them. To solve this problem - Centralized Contact Management was created.
Centralized Contact Management (CCM) was first to be created utilizing Computer Technology. Years ago, I've seen large Thai conglomerate keeping all of their customer contact information in Lotus 1-2-3. They later consolidated all contacts in an Ashton-Tate dBase III.
Later on, IT professionals try to move Salesperson's notebook to become CRM database since Customer Information was already in Electronic format by late 1980s.
More on this later. Continue on CRM (2) ..
posted by Peter Srivaree-Ratana at 12:49 AM
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