All About CRM's (a constant balancing act)

The Intent

The Internet is one of the most innovative and adaptive pieces of technology that the world has ever been introduced to. Its presence is expanding into the world of business and is continually evolving the relationships between business owners, customers, and legislators at an ever growing rate. However, with this new relationship comes growing concerns with the inherent weaknesses in e-business functions. These weaknesses typically focus around balancing the need to collect accurate consumer and industry data that can provide the organization with information while maintaining an acceptable level of privacy and security for all stakeholders involved. A variety of companies have either developed or purchased software packages and protocols to ensure their partners' personal and business information remains secure. However, these same companies have also implemented software and policies that enable them to mine their customers' computers and internet activities to gain information. The rationale behind this is that these organizations want to be able to maintain a competitive advantage in their marketplace.

The reason for creating this site is to discuss and inform the public on balancing effective Customer Relations Management (CRM) through the use of the Internet with the issues of individual privacy and security. Within my site there are respective links that will bring you to different aspects of this issue.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

“The days of "big bang" CRM implementations of rolling out sales, service and marketing are over. So too, are the days of small, tactical deployments with no view of the long term. What's emerging is a new way of thinking about CRM.”(searchCRM.com)

"CRM, in an e-business context, is the use of technologies to establish, develop, maintain, and optimize relationships with customers by focusing on the understanding of needs and desires." (Trites, et al., 2006a, p. 172)

"In marketing, you could argue the CRM solutions have been the least mature, the last ones to be built out by solution providers," Band said. "The whole marketing space is undergoing a lot of change right now." (searchCRM.com)

Operational CRM

"Operational CRM focuses on the direct support of the day-to-day needs of customer-facing employees. The goal of companies considering an Operational CRM system is to implement a seamless set of end-to-end processes (workflow) supported by multiple data sources through a composite user interface." (MITEM, 2004)

"Operational CRM is broadly speaking the ability to handle high volumes of customer contacts across a variety of channels and the capacity to handle the transactions that arise from these contacts." (CYBAEA, 2003)

Analytical CRM

"Analytical CRM also serves as the glue or connection between the operational customer-facing applications such as sales, service and Web channel and the analytical back-office systems, business intelligence solutions and customer data warehouses." (Humbarger, 2002)

"Analytical CRM is the data infrastructure that collects together customer, contact, and sales information, and provides tools for analysis.” (CYBAEA, 2003)

Strengths

-can help to find and explore useful knowledge in large customer databases.

-classify customers, predict customer behaviors and select market approach.

Weakness

-certain CRM techniques can be very complicated and difficult to understand.

-early stage of implementation.