What is the Costumer Relationship Management –CRM?

The world has undergone deep and important transformations, mainly in the last five years, impelled by the growth of the Internet. When obtaining in the Web a powerful channel of commercialization and communication plus, the corporative sector, I need to review some concepts and reconstruct. In the digital era, everything is very fast. The concurrence is to the distance of a simple click of the mouse. In order to be able to compete in that scene, it is not enough with offering products and services with better quality and price. It is required, also, to know the consumer, to be able to satisfy it and not to lose it, later, to continue with the concurrence. In other words, it becomes necessary to know how to create and administrate the relation with the client, in a way to make possible the generation of value for the company. The great question is: How to do that?

It is not by chance that one of the subjects that have most called the attention of the companies and that has been widely debated in specific events and in specialized mediums, is the CRM - Customer Relationship Management -, a philosophy that involves people, processes and technology, which contemplates the creation of a systematic to acquire greater knowledge on the client throughout all his life and not only from the moment in which he makes a commercial transaction with the company. It is a new concept that does not has its own endorsement in the academic world, but that is protected by the great parents of the Marketing research, between which are Phillip Kotler (author of the book Administration of Marketing, considered a bible in the Marketing World), Robert Kaplan and David Norton (authors of the book Balanced Scorecard), Patricia Seybold (Cliente.com) and Don Peppers and Martha Rogers (authors of several works about the one-to-one Marketing or Marketing research of Relations)

In simple terms, the CRM can be understood as a strategy that allows the company to have a vision of its client and, from there, know how to explore the business opportunities. For that it is necessary to take advantage of all the interactions that the corporation has with the client in the sense to catch data and to transform it into information that can be scattered by the organization, allowing that all the departments – attention center, sales, marketing research, direction, etc. - see the client of the same form, in other words, know who is he, what he likes, his preferences, how many times he has been communicating, claims that he has done, suggestions he has made, how much value he represents for the company, and many others. At the moment, few corporations know their clients with that depth. And why is that so important? Studies done in the North American Market concluded that, in a term of five years, a company loses half of its clients and spends five times more money in the search of new, not giving importance to the old ones. .

Another interesting fact is that a satisfied buyer always comments its purchase with five people, whereas an unsatisfied complains of the company with nine. By those reasons, the basic principles of the CRM sustain the necessity to know how to identify, differentiate (by its value and necessities) and interact with the client to establish a continuous relation of learning and this way, be able to offer a customized attention, that is satisfactory as much for the consumer, as for the company.

All the information relative to that relation of the client with the enterprise requires to be compiled or recovered at the moment at which contact is being signed. That is, when the client communicates, so that he is known and the company can take advantage of that moment to obtain more information and also to offer new products and services that adapt to the profile of that person in particular. For that it is necessary to make intensive use of the technology of the information. But not only that, also is necessary to change the culture of the organization, through personnel qualification.

To implement technologies of CRM without making the redesign of the internal processes of the company and without creating a model of relations and client-attention, could end as only being an information project for the attention center or sales center, without leading to the results expected for by the organization.