CRM Application And Support

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) involves identifying, understanding and better servicing the needs of the organisation’s customers, while simultaneously forging long term relations with the customers for improving customer satisfaction, and thereby improving organisation’s financial performance. CRM thus is about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers' needs. Since this cannot be done manually, organizations use various CRM applications/ CRM software for this purpose.
CRM applications are a powerful suite of high-end tools that help to effectively streamline business sales, marketing and customer relationship functions.
An example of a CRM application would be in the banking and financial services sector, which depends to a large extent on cross selling various banking products to its customers. For e.g., a use case of a CRM application in the BFSI sector would be to keep track of the net worth of the individual. The feedback from that customer to the sales team who has gone to sell, say a current/savings account him. The feedback could be fed in by the sales team into the CRM application, which could then be used by the credit cards division/ home loans division, etc of the same bank, to sell these assets to the same customer. Thus, information could be used to build a multi-layered relationship with the customer, where the relationship manager of the bank could use the CRM application deployed to understand, anticipate and respond to the customer’s need.
CRM applications maintain customer database, and proper analysis and utilization of MIS reports generated/ relationship opportunities identified would maximize the return on investment (ROI) on the CRM application.
However, deployment of the CRM application is not enough. To maximize the benefits of a CRM application, the implementing organization/ firm has to ensure adequate CRM support, by way of technical support, training support, hardware/ software support, change management, etc is available to the users of the system, either by the in-house technical team or by the outsourced third party