CRM is an integrated approach to identifying, acquiring, and retaining customers. By enabling organizations to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, departments, lines of business, and geographies, CRM helps organizations maximize the value of every customer interaction and drive superior corporate performance. Today’s organizations must manage customer interactions across multiple communications channels—including the Web, call centers, field sales, and dealers or partner networks. Many organizations also have multiple lines of business with many overlapping customers. The challenge is to make it easy for customers to do business with the organization any way they want—at any time, through any channel, in any language or currency— and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organization that recognizes them at every touch point .

• Provide better customer service
• Make call centers more efficient
• Cross sell products more effectively
• Help sales staff close deals faster simplify marketing and sales processes
• Discover new customers
• Increase customer revenues

 What are the keys to successful CRM implementation?

• Break your CRM project down into manageable pieces by setting up pilot programs and short-term milestones. Starting with a pilot project that incorporates all the necessary departments and groups that gets projects rolling quickly but is small enough and flexible enough to allow tinkering along the way.
• Make sure your CRM plans include a scalable architecture framework.
• Don't underestimate how much data you might collect (there will be LOTS) and make sure that if you need to expand systems you'll be able to.
• Be thoughtful about what data is collected and stored. The impulse will be to grab and then store EVERY piece of data you can, but there is often no reason to store data. Storing useless data wastes time and money.
• Recognize the individuality of customers and respond appropriately. A CRM system should, for example, have built-in pricing flexibility.

The biggest returns come from aligning business, CRM and IT strategies across all departments and not just leaving it for one group to run.

 What causes CRM projects to fail ?

From the beginning, lack of a communication between everyone in the customer relationship chain can lead to an incomplete picture of the customer. Poor communication can lead to technology being implemented without proper support or buy-in from users. For example, if the sales force isn't completely sold on the system's benefits, they may not input the kind of demographic data that is essential to the program's success. One Fortune 500 company is on its fourth try at a CRM implementation, primarily because its sale force resisted all the previous efforts to share customer data.

 Solution:-

There are three proven methodologies for creating good relationship

• Customer Intelligence,
•  High Performance Contact Center,
•  and Customer Relationship Managemen

Customer Intelligence derived through the effective deployment of data management is critical to the success of any business plan. With the right data management capabilities, enterprises can gain insight into value chains and understand their customers better

Fortune 1000 companies have invested heavily in CRM projects and many did not achieved desired results. Typically, these efforts focused on point solutions for sales force and customer service automation. While efficiencies were realized, most did not achieve desired improvements in customer retention and profitability. Why?

The survey of senior executives at leading companies across multiple industries assesses key capabilities within the three major dimensions

Customer Information Integration
Customer Insights: Analytic Modeling and Segmentation
Making Customer Insights Operational

 Customer Intelligence (CI)

How will your Strategies, Processes and Technologies Evolve to Address these Challenges and Ensure Profitable Customer Relationships?
By gaining a thorough understanding of your customers and applying this knowledge to your customer acquisition, retention and growth programs, you can truly distinguish your company’s offerings from those of your competitors..
Every company has knowledge of its customer base, but very few have consolidated silos of information to achieve a comprehensive view of customer activity. Optimization of this information — channeling, defining, analyzing and operational zings it — is the key to true customer value.

Customer Analytics approach and strategy taken by the organization would be to gather, analyze, and ultimately utilize the wealth of customer insights to better understand and satisfy the needs of its valued customers.