CRM Duties

With CRM, each employee's role become more customer focused.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a prominent 21st century business marketing system that leverages traditional marketing principles of customer loyalty with advanced database technology. Many customer and client-driven businesses use enterprise-wide CRM programs that alter the traditional roles of many job functions to more customer-centric roles. For CRM success, companies need strong collaboration across all departments in the organization, and each critical business function must perform certain CRM duties.

Marketing

Marketing is often considered the champion of CRM in a company. CRM is typically considered a marketing-led program or business system. Marketing employees establish objectives for CRM programs and projects. They work closely with information technology (IT) employees to gather and analyze data on customers. This data is used for interpretation of the customer experience and success of various sales and service initiatives. Marketing also generates reports for top management to demonstrate the bottom line business results of CRM implementation.

Sales and Service

Many people consider CRM mostly a sales software solution. In some companies, this is actually the case. Companies buy sales automation software that provides simple contact and customer management tools for sales use. However, sales and service in an enterprise-wide CRM are two of the integral components in the collaborative effort to enhance customer relationships. Sales employees can use CRM tools to better qualify prospects, and to more accurately monitor sales leads and sales performance. Service plays another major role in following up those customers after the sale. Salespeople and dedicated service employees use data and relationship tracking to assure customers have positive experiences. This is critical to the true focus of CRM of building and maintaining successful long-term customer relationships.

Information Technology

Information technology, or IT, departments often have the most important change of focus when a company begins CRM. The traditional role of IT is to provide support for employees. Within CRM, IT performs customer-enabling tasks that help marketing, sales and service employees make use of data to provide a better customer experiences. IT departments must collaborate on infrastructure buildup, including selection of all-important CRM software solutions. They must also work closely with marketing and sales to pull data from the software database for efficient analysis.

Others

In a true company-wide CRM program, all employees must take on a more customer-centric role. If a customer calls the finance department, employees in that area must know how to treat customers with respect, and possess the right information to address their customers' needs. Office and support staff must engage customers in-person, on the phone, via e-mail, or through any other touch points with kindness and a friendly attitude. This personal engagement is the essence of a "relationship program."

References

• Business Dictionary: Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Marketing Hackz: CRM: The Key to Marketing Strategy
• Microsoft; The Role of IT in CRM Analytics; Fawn Fitter
• Sales Force Automation: Simple Methods For Using CRM to Increase Revenue