CRM - old acronym, same business value

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has its roots in the basic business justification that:

you should satisfy customers with the best possible product in the market
through a relational exchange process.

Its as simple as that! However,the term has fallen out of favour to more recent and newly-hyped theories & tools such as anaytics-based and 1-to-1 marketing . Why?


Customer relationship management goes beyond the normal transactional model (customer told, customer buys, customer goes away) but actaully enables the marketer to estimate the customer's sentiment and buying intention, so that the customer can be provided with products and services before they start asking (or even realise).


This is possible through the integration of four important company components:

• people
• process
• technology
• data.

Perhaps its time we take a look again at CRM.