Customer relationship management (CRM) involves bringing together various strategies, practices, and technologies to analyze and manage the interactions between customers and the company. These technological solutions are employed in an organization to improve customer relationships, retain customers, and eventually increase sales. There are three types of CRM solutions that help organizations leverage their operations. These include operational CRMs, analytical CRMs, and Collaborative CRMs ( Fuchs, 2019 ). Operational CRMs are developed to facilitate the simplification and streamlining of business processes. Analytical CRMs utilize data gathering and analysis to facilitate better customer service. Finally, collaborative CRMs seek to synchronize marketing, sales, and servicing departments to better understand and serve the customers. This paper seeks to research and explain how companies utilize CRM to their advantage by leveraging CRM in both structuring and leveraging their available and collected data.
Organizations leverage CRM solutions in structuring in various ways. CRM solution helps organizations to develop the best infrastructure to attract and retain customers. Operational CRMs, through sales automation, service automation, and marketing automation, help the company alter the organizational structure to simplify business processes. Employees who would otherwise be involved in tedious activities such as distributing content offers, coordination of email campaigns, and reaching out to customers get eased by automation. Due to automation, the organizational structure is streamlined to ensure that various activities flow smoothly. Sales automation streamlines the sales process and makes it easier for the sales officials to interact and bring more customers on board easily ( Pakdaman et al., 2013 ). CRM also leverages structuring by allowing the sales representative to automatically and easily delegate contact, regulate leads, and create tasks and deals. Sales automation also facilitates clear sales record visibility, creation of sales records, and easier leads prioritization.
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Through service, automation organizations can develop a better customer experience, thus making them loyal and better brand ambassadors. Service automation which forms part of operational CRM creates a framework where sales representatives have one on one conversation with the customers. Service automation also facilitates the delegation of service tasks to sales representatives through ticking systems. Service automation is also associated with FAQ pages and live chats, all of which ensure that the employee's responsibilities are geared towards better customer services ( Pakdaman et al., 2013 ). Operational CRM helps companies that seek to automate various workflow by ensuring that they restructure and remove humans from the monotonous administrative activities. Therefore organizations usually leverage operational CRM in structuring by automating and ensuring smooth and simplified business processes.
Other than leveraging CRM in structuring, organizations also use CRM to leverage their available and collected data. Analytical CRMs analyze data such as contact data, customer properties, customer preferences, and other customer information obtained through online and offline channels ( Taylor, 2014 ). Organizations later leverage the available and collected data for better customer support, effective marketing campaign, and improved sales effort. Some of the analytical CRM components that deal with data analysis include data mining, OLAP tools, and data warehousing. Data mining is a term referring to the process of obtaining patterns in large data sets. It is through data mining that organizations obtain customer information and data trends relevant to the organization's operation. Data mining ensures that the bigger picture of the customer lifecycle is obtained. The data warehouse is the database used in many CRMs.
Data warehouse facilitates the integration, preparation, and collection of customer data for analysis. Since data warehouses keep historical and current data in a single space, it makes data analysis and extraction easier. Online analytical processing (OLAP) tools are tools used to analyze multidimensional data from various perspectives kept in databases ( Fuchs, 2019 ). These tools allow organizations to use data to the maximum advantage by facilitating the analysis of various data dimensions simultaneously. OLAP tools also help in the validation of hypotheses obtained from one of the customer's information components.
References
Fuchs, J. (2019). The 3 Types of CRM Software (and Which Is Right for Your Business). Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/types-of-crm
Pakdaman, A. J., Malmir, A., Azizzadeh, S., & Azizzadeh, F. (2013). The relationship between organization structure and CRM.
Taylor, M. (2014). Advantages of Customer Relationship Management - CRM Simplified . CRM Simplified. Retrieved 10 November 2020, from https://crm.walkme.com/advantages-customer-relationship-management/#:~:text=A%20CRM%20system%20coordinates%20customer,such%20conflicts%20do%20not%20arise.&text=A%20CRM%20system%20helps%20in,they%20are%20responded%20to%20promptly .
