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Return To CRM Article Archive   Implementing CRM - Simple But Effective Guidelines By Jamie Langdon There are many technological components to implementing CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a strategic process that will help you better understand your customers' needs and how you can meet those needs and enhance your bottom line at the same time. This strategy depends on bringing together lots of pieces of information about customers and market trends so you can sell and market your products and services more effectively. Customer relationship management is a corporate level strategy which focuses on creating and maintaining lasting relationships with its customers. Although there are several commercial CRM software packages on the market which support CRM strategy, it is not a technology itself. Rather, a holistic change in an organisations philosophy which places emphasis on the customer. A successful CRM strategy cannot be implemented by simply installing and integrating a software package and will not happen over night. Changes must occur at all levels including policies and processes, front of house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management; all aspects of the business must be reshaped to be customer driven. To be effective, the CRM process needs to be integrated end-to-end across marketing, sales, and customer service. A good CRM program needs to: - Identify customer success factors - Create a customer-based culture - Adopt customer-based measures - Develop an end-to-end process to serve customers - Recommend what questions to ask to help a customer solve a problem - Recommend what to tell a customer with a complaint about a purchase - Track all aspects of selling to customers and prospects as well as customer support When setting up a CRM segment for a company it might first want to identify what profile aspects it feels are relevant to its business, such as what information it needs to serve its customers, the customers past financial history, the effects of the CRM segment and what information is not useful. Being able to eliminate unwanted information can be a large aspect of implementing CRM systems. When designing a CRMs structure, a company may want to consider keeping more extensive information on their primary customers and keeping less extensive details on the low-margin clients About the Author: Jamie Langdon is a senior CRM solution specialist and has 17 years experience with CRM solutions. Jamie operates a website that allows companies to choose from a wide variety of crm applications focused around specific industry verticals www.pythagoras.co.uk keywords: CRM | Customer Relationship Management | Customer Service Call Center Benchmarking

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