A strategy for managing all the company’s activities with the potential, current, and prospective customers is described as Customer Relationship Management. Customer relationship management helps to increase productivity, creation of more business ventures and improve the customer’s satisfaction. Customer Relationship Management has its widespread advantages as a company can be able to keep records of its previous transactions, their sales, pending invoices and interactions with their customers. In addition, it helps a company to view data from other social networks that is their likes and dislikes and what information they are sharing about your company.
A sales team in any company can use Customer Relationship Management to track their individual clients, their preferences, their location, sales process, their activities in the social media and records of the previous email conversations. With this information, the sales team possesses vital information that they need to take the right step in any market at the right time. There are several characteristics that contribute to making Customer Relationship Management an important tool for sales and marketing. In this essay will describe the tool which improves the company performance and contributions to the future of the company, the characteristics of a successful Customer Relationship Management implementation (Yen 42).
The first step involves preparation of team members; it is in this step that the team members are requires to read the selected materials that describe the concept of Customer Relationship Management. The training is protected from the ebb and the flow of the business. During training, the team is required to pay maximum attention and avoid any form of destruction. Proper preparation will give room to the next step and will involve individual exercising in this step. In this step, establishment of data entry standards for feeding information on each lead and opportunity is made. This prepares room for discussion by the team and lays ground for entry of leads and opportunities to the customer relationship management. Team discussion is the third step it is meant to be an interactive and dynamic process. Sales member should participate actively in key decisions such as emerging opportunities and ways to increase sales revenue. In these steps, ideas are exchanged, and everyone get to benefit from other team mates wisdom (Manring 85).
Guided Data Entry is the fourth step. In the data entry sales members are required to key in information about the opportunities that are channeled to the customer relationship management. The information will be entered using the standard data made during the exercise period. The sales team is guided by the graters partners. They are responsible for ensuring that every staff is equipped with the necessary skills, which will help them to navigate the Customer Relationship Management efficiently. The last step is setting metrics and continuous assessment. Customer Relationship Management is used by the management to set, enforce and track metrics for the team. With this, it is possible to carry out performance measurement. The Leader board summarizes and provides a report of every employee contribution and progress toward the revenue goals that have been set. Succession of each step is very important as it leads to the successful completion of other steps (Wilson 341).
There are companies that are involved with Customer Relationship Management. These companies include; the Microsoft dynamics. They offer accelerators that allow business professionals to analyze customers and keep track of their conversation on their social networks. This results in updating their status about the products and services (Shervani 552). They are partners with Neighborhood America. Sales force is also one of the companies that offer Customer Relationship Management. Sales Force is involved in offering access to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. For instance, SAP has imported Twitter feed and also offers social features like Q&A and other social networking like Chatter and LinkedIn Integration. The system also offers a Customer Relationship Management that is involved in providing social media analytics that can be used in areas of reporting, customer tracking and web marketing. Buzzient has partnered with other companies like Oracle, Sales Force and Sugar Customer Relationship Management.
Oracle Siebel Social Company offers an opportunity in assessing customers’ behaviors, and common content that is to be shared among the sales team. Another company that offers several features such as cloud monitoring, social experience design, innovation communities and support communities is Right Now customer relationship management (Shapiro 45). The company recently secured High live which is an enterprise community platform. Sugar Customer Relationship Management provides cloud connectors that connect via Web services. This leads to the third party service providers such as Jigsaw, LinkedIn and Hoovers.
ACT is also among the companies that are involved in Customer relationship management. ACT provides a platform where an individual is allowed to manage different types of information such as social. However, this product can fit the quota if extended across an enterprise. Patch Blue, though it is not a traditional customer relationship management, has automation features sales that connect with existing social graph data (Yu 47). There are other community platforms that offer social customer relationship management which include; Leverage software, Neighborhood America, Jive Software, Lithium Technologies and Concourse. These companies work with partnership with other companies.
In conclusion, Customer Relationship Management software has helped many organizations to manage their customer’s relationship. Customer Relationship Management can be offered through software on premise and demand.
WORKS CITED
Yen, Tax.” Internet integrated customer relationship management, success factor for companies in the e- commerce arena.” Journal of computer information systems. 2002, pp, 42
Manring, Audrey,” Profiling the chief customer officer,” Customer Relationship Management, 2002, pp 86-93
Wilson, Madsen, “An Integrated Model of Buyer Seller Relationships.” Journal of Marketing Science, pp. 333-354 2000
Shervani, Srivastava, “Customer Profitability: Analysis and Design Issues,” Handbook of relationship Marketing, pp 567-598
Shapiro, Sheth Close encounters of the four kinds: Managing Customers in a rapidly Changing Environment 1988
Yu, Successful customer Relationship management. Management Review, summer 2001, pp 46
