Customer Relationship Management

Nowadays, more and more enterprises, especially hotels, put specific emphasis on the management of customer relationship. They start to notice that today’s market is no longer the enterprise-oriented market, while turns to be customer-oriented. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a series of commercial activities that are designed to help a company obtain and maintain the closer and long-term relationship with customers, so as to understand more about each individual, and then create value for them. Thus, customers can be more valuable to the company as well. In order to implement CRM strategies, the company needs to utilize advanced information

Apple Incorporated is one of the world’s largest electronic products company along with one of their biggest rivals Samsung Electronics and seconds world’s largest mobile phone provider after Samsung Electronics. There are over 420 Apple retail stores in 14 different countries around the world and employ over 75,000 people. These Apple retail stores sell Apple products such as iPhones, iPad, apple macs etc. Apple also sell their products online on the Apple website.

According to Sutton, R. I., in order to innovate, we have to “ignore what has happened before” (Sutton, 2001). However to ignore any existing, globally accepted phenomenon, we need to develop something that not only performs the desired functionality but also does it more efficiently. This definitely is a challenge for service based companies, which believe in using the existing industry standard tools for catering to the client needs with little or no importance to improving the way in which the deliverable was created. Not to forget the projects operated within these companies are bound by rigid timelines, so the idea of innovation is intimidating for the employee, the managers and the stakeholder.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the new title for relationship marketing. Explain why this is so and suggest how CRM can be effectively incorporated into a marketing plan.

Harrah’s decided to follow foot print of their founders and make customer loyalty as their core competency since they felt that they could leverage this skill to become the industry leader. The Harrah’s initial focus was to find out the customers who were not so loyal customers and visiting their competitors, and then try making them to regular customers. For this, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives were launched and were implemented across all Harrah’s casinos.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an important part of any companies ' sales mix. As part of a sales mix, companies must have a strong sales team; a well planned and executed marketing strategy, and a method to record pertinent information to manage customer relations. A CRM system is an important part in any company. They have a variety of uses from holding basic information such as names and address, to holding other information including relationship history, contract information, and recording customer satisfaction levels.

In the past two decades, huge marketing and mass marketing have been changed competitive landscape due to growing goods available for consumers. Proliferation of business activities would focus on customer relationship management, which is to achieve competitiveness (Chen et al., 2003). As the concept of customer relationship management has a significant change, there are a variety of CRM definitions depending on the angle of view. An important concept in customer relationship management is customer value. Customer value is the customer relationship to the enterprise 's financial value. It can be reflected in the contribution margin or net profit. Customer value is widely used by enterprises to evaluate their marketing efforts.

This paper enhances the bread of CRM awareness thus helping in adding more customer value and consequently shareholder value. The paper discusses alternative perspectives of CRM where Payne and Frow (2005) emphasizes the need cross-functional, process-oriented approach that positions CRM at a strategic level. The paper identifies five such processes and goes on to develop a new conceptual framework

The most important aspect of any company that is involved in medium to big projects, is the company’s relationship with its clients. It is so important that companies like BNSF Railways, which was awarded Customer Relationship Management Excellence Awards in 2006 by Gartner Inc. (Schwalbe, K., pp 56, 2010), boosted its sales by simply investing more in customer relationship management. To reinforce the importance of CRM, studies conducted by HUFS College of Business, Korea, suggests that implementation of a good CRM positively impacts the customer satisfaction (Adalikwu, C., pp 6684, 2012).

Most people believe that CRM is just a system that will run their business without making any efforts which is totally wrong. The CRM is a strategy that is run by people to acquire, manage, select, grow and retain a strong relationship with the right customers with the best long-term profit potential. This cannot be done with a CRM system without a good strategy that puts the employees on the right track.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business philosophy, not just a technology - understanding your customers ' needs enables you to build better relationships and increase sales.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a method that provides an interconnection between a company and its customers for a substantial growth in the business, especially in terms of interactions between the two. It comprises usage of a set of methodologies focusing on customer driving. It was duly noted that despite the economic challenges that many companies have faced over the past few years, mainly the global economic downfall in 2008, which critically affected developed economies in USA and Europe; as well as the current problems affecting European firms following the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis — expenditure on Customer Relationship Management products has continued to observe significant growth during the past five years,

Customer Relationship Management, also known as CRM, is a technology system that enhances communication between the user and the potential or existing customer. The system is most commonly used in a company to support sales, information technology, and customer service. CRM assists a company by providing and recording information to better help the company align with their customer service goals. According to B. O’Connell (2001) in “CRM: The New Know-Your-Customer Tool: Customer Relationship Management Software Is Coming,” it gathers and tracks “all client-related information including transactions and email, in-person and phone communications…” (p. 1). Not all information that is collected is used. Companies, such as Fidelity Investments, track incoming calls and periodically review how well the company supported the customer and found a solution to the problem.

This chapter contains Background of the problem, statement of the problem, objective of the study, justification of the study, significance of the study, research hypothesis and finally, assumptions of the study.

Examination Paper: Customer Relationship Management IIBM Institute of Business Management Examination Paper Customer Relationship Management Section A: Objective Type (30 marks) • • • This section consists of Multiple Choice questions & Short notes type questions. Answer all the questions. Part One questions carry 1 mark each & Part Two questions carry 4 marks each. MM.100