Customer Relationship Management

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.

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

In the past few decades Customer relationship was none existence with business organization making no effort to build relationships with its customers. But since then strong competition has forced business to form long lasting relationships with its customers, if it needs to stay in business. The term Customer Relationship Marketing first emerged during the 1990’s. It was made possible due to the advancement in IT and the flow of information. IT allowed business to store and retrieve Customer information so thus it lead to the definition information enabled relationship marketing ( Ryals & Payne, 2001). However CRM does have a wide definition but what is

RM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is an approach used to learn more about customers' needs and manners in order to develop stronger relationships with them. Good customer relationships are at the core of business achievement. There are many technological mechanisms to CRM, but thinking about CRM in mainly technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a calculated process that will help you better understand your customers’ needs and how you can meet those needs and increase your bottom line at the same time. This strategy depends on gathering lots of pieces of information about customers and market trends so you can sell and market your products and services more effectively.

Customer relationship management is a customer focused business strategy that dynamically integrates sales, marketing and customer services, in order to create and add value for the company and its customer.

The purpose of this document is to understand the customer relationship management and how it impacts the overall organization’s objective.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for operating all your enterprise’s relationships and interactions with your clients and future clients. http://www.salesforce.com/uk/crm/what-is-crm.jsp

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for operating all your enterprise’s relationships and interactions with your clients and future clients (What is CRM.)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is significant in the service marketing these days, customers are the major element that relates to the company growth and profits. Understanding the customer purchase behavior and relationship is a key of success that commonly indicates the B2B & B2C relationship management. CRM system provides the customer information that shows what customer wants and needs, and help sales person to increase the customer relationship with the organization. Besides, customer relationship management is used in the business and marketing strategies extensively by segment and targeting the major customer groups. The system presents the customer needs and performances that can help the company to attract the new customer, increase customer satisfaction, reduce the customer manage cost and increase sales productivity.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an essential part of every modern business. At the beginning of 21st century, the customer power dramatically increased due to Internet and technology development. The objectives of CRM are to build profitable and long-term relationships with customers. CRM is a complete system that provides a 360-degree view of the customer. It is also a method that tends to capture the experience of the consumers, and gain their trust to remain loyal customers. It is also considered to be a philosophy with many different applications. One of them is that CRM is a strategic tool that involves marketing, sales, service, and supporting technologies that produce mutual value, revenue, solutions, and efficiency to businesses and customers. Through those applications CRM is focused on assisting the customer service process and identifying customers’ values. Its goal is focused on optimizing customers’ experiences through adding values to their services. CRM is trying to bring the idea that business is not only offering products or services, but also an experience. It is like an inner window in customers’ needs that provides the necessary information to make their experience better. CRM strives to provide customers with a positive, happy experience each and every time.

Methodology refers the focus toward science that studies the method of problem solving. Most sciences have their own methodology it is sometimes used separately with ‘’methods’’ particularly, however a complex methods or body of methods rules and postulate employed by discipline.

Many firms using CRM to achieve their competitive advantage by understanding individual customer needs, and therefore to manage their marketing efforts more efficiently. For the rapid changes in the market-place, technology and marketing functions, customers are becoming more aware, less loyal and less acceptance of low service levels. These changes lead firms to make their marketing functions customer-based rather than product-based. In addition, growth in data storage technology has made it possible for firms to obtain more amount of customer-level information. All these reasons making effect on the rapid growth and increasing the awareness of CRM.

I hereby declare that this project is entirely my own work and that any additional sources of information have been duly cited.