CRM

What is CRM? 

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, which is customer-oriented management that utilizes active creation and maintenance of mutually beneficial, long-term relationships between the customer and the company. These relationships must be mutually beneficial and advantageous (a win-win situation), and they exclude unethical behaviour towards the customer. 

What is the purpose of CRM? 

CRM can be loosely translated as managing customer relationships. It can be considered a database-oriented tool where information about the customer is stored and processed to maximize meeting their requirements and maintaining good relationships by adhering to routines, for example, that the customer is accustomed to. 

Practical use of CRM 

The implementation of CRM in practice must be approved at the company-wide level because active customer relationships involve not only contact departments (sales, marketing) but also other internal structures. The philosophy of CRM involves a gradual shift away from the marketing strategy of pushing products onto the market and an increase in activities aimed at understanding the customer, their needs, and habits. Ultimately, this approach brings profit to the company through satisfied customers. It doesn't mean that marketing or sales departments will disappear; rather, the way and form of their activities will be adjusted. Within CRM, additional structures are introduced, such as analytical departments that can extract necessary information from the collected data for more targeted marketing. 

The CRM approach can be divided into several types. 

The first type is called collaborative. This type is directly in contact with the customer and represents the layer that communicates with customers through various channels. This includes websites, call centres, or field representatives. Their task is to collect customer data for other types of CRM. 

The second type is operational CRM, which covers sales, marketing, and services. It serves as support for business processes. All information gathered in operational CRM is stored, including emails, meeting results, and phone call contents. Because this involves sensitive data, its security must be ensured. An advantage of operational CRM is the ability to choose communication channels based on customer experiences. 

Operational CRM is mainly used for creating marketing campaigns and tracking them, as well as automating the sales process, including monitoring its progress. 

The third type of CRM is analytical. This type analyses the gathered customer data to fulfil various goals, such as optimizing marketing campaigns, finding new sales channels, customer retention, analysing customer behaviour regarding pricing, predicting customer profitability, etc. 

For the successful functioning of all CRM types, communication between them and the archiving of customer data and analysis results are necessary. Data archiving must meet conditions for secure data storage to prevent misuse. 

Currently, there are several professional software solutions for CRM available on the market. 

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