Test Your CRM Knowledge

Managing Customer Interactions: An Overview

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a process for managing interactions with customers using data analysis to study large amounts of information.

• CRM systems compile data from various communication channels, including a company's website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and social media.

• The global CRM market size is estimated at $69 billion in 2020.

• The concept of CRM started in the early 1970s, with the Farley File being one of the best-known precursors of modern-day CRM.

• The trend was followed by numerous companies and independent developers trying to maximize lead potential, including Siebel Systems, who designed the first CRM product in 1993.

• CRM was popularized in 1997, and leading CRM products were enriched with shipping and marketing capabilities between 1997 and 2000.

• The first open-source CRM system was developed by SugarCRM in 2004.

• CRM systems include strategic, operational, analytical, collaborative, and customer data platform types.

• Customer satisfaction has important implications for the economic performance of firms because it has the ability to increase customer loyalty and usage behavior and reduce customer complaints and the likelihood of customer defection.

• Customer profiling is a method to understand customers in terms of demographics, behavior, and lifestyle, and it is used to help make customer-focused decisions.

• Companies must improve the relational intelligence of their CRM systems to better understand customer relationships, and they should invest in training programs to teach employees to recognize and effectively create strong customer-brand relationships.

• Contact center CRM providers are popular for small and mid-market businesses, and gamifying, or using game design elements and game principles in a non-game context, is growing in popularity.CRM: Trends, Tools, and Challenges

• Gamification tools can motivate customer service agents by tapping into their desire for rewards, recognition, achievements, and competition.

• Contact-center automation (CCA) is designed to reduce the repetitive and tedious parts of a contact center agent's job by having pre-recorded audio messages that help customers solve their problems.

• Social CRM involves the use of social media and technology to engage and learn from consumers, and CRM systems can integrate social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to track and communicate with customers.

• Enterprise feedback management software platforms combine internal survey data with trends identified through social media to allow businesses to make more accurate decisions on which products to supply.

• CRM systems can include technologies that create geographic marketing campaigns based on a customer's physical location and integrate with popular location-based GPS applications.

• CRM systems can be applied to B2B environments to streamline and improve customer management conditions, and the main differences between B2C and B2B CRM systems concern aspects like sizing of contact databases and length of relationships.

• Sales forces play an important role in CRM, and some of the top CRM trends identified in 2021 include focusing on customer service automation, hyper-personalization based on customer data and insights, and the use of unified CRM systems.

• Vendor relationship management (VRM) provides tools and services that allow customers to manage their individual relationship with vendors, and this trend fuels demand for additional capabilities for a more holistic understanding of customer health.

• Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics were identified as the newest trends in CRM in 2017.

• Companies face large challenges when trying to implement CRM systems, and many studies show that customers are frequently frustrated by a company's inability to meet their relationship expectations.

• The CRM paradox, also referred to as the "dark side of CRM," may entail favoritism and differential treatment of some customers, potentially decreasing profits because of it.

• CRM technologies can easily become ineffective if there is no proper management, and they are not implemented correctly.