🔖 Topic- 17.2: How do customer relationship management systems help firms achieve customer intimacy?

What kinds of information would you need to build and nurture strong, longlasting relationships with customers? You’d want to know exactly who your customers are, how to contact them, whether they are costly to service and sell to, what kinds of products and services they are interested in, and how much money they spend on your company. If you could, you’d want to make sure you knew each of your customers well, as if you were running a small-town store. And you’d want to make your good customers feel special. 

In a small business operating in a neighborhood, it is possible for the business owners and managers to know their customers well on a personal, face-to-face basis, but in a large business operating on a metropolitan, regional, national, or even global basis, it is impossible to know your customer in this intimate way. In these kinds of businesses, there are too many customers and too many ways that customers interact with the firm (over the web, the phone, e-mail, blogs, and in-person). It becomes especially difficult to integrate information from all these sources and deal with a large number of customers. 

A large business’s processes for sales, service, and marketing tend to be highly compartmentalized, and these departments do not share much essential customer information. Some information on a specific customer might be stored and organized in terms of that person’s account with the company. Other pieces of information about the same customer might be organized by-products that were purchased. In this traditional business environment, there is no convenient way to consolidate all this information to provide a unified view of a customer across the company. 

This is where customer relationship management systems help. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems, capture and integrate customer data from all over the organization, consolidate the data, analyze the data, and then distribute the results to various systems and customer touchpoints across the enterprise. A touchpoint (also known as a contact point) is a method of interaction with the customer, such as telephone, e-mail, customer service desk, conventional mail, Facebook, Twitter, website, wireless device, or retail store. Well-designed CRM systems provide a single enterprise view of customers that is useful for improving both sales and customer service (see Figure 9. 6 .)