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Executive Summary CRM as we know it today has evolved out of a variety of stand-alone

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Executive Summary

CRM as we know it today has evolved out of a variety of stand-alone technologies, such as call centers, and sales force automation systems. During the 1980s companies had begun to notice that it was possible to consolidate these disparate technologies. Insurance companies and banks, in particular, saw a golden marketing opportunity in the customer data they had gathered. Call centers began to conduct outbound calls such as up-selling where they would persuade the customer to purchase: more products from their line, upgrades, or other add-ons and so on. Soon enough customers began to be seen as a single entity across all departments, which led to a single view of ‘the customer’. Customers soon got used to CRM care and …show more content…

This paper shall chronologically recap the growth and the development of customer relationship management and its role in the business world today.
Introduction

Before taking a look at CRM from a technological standpoint, a historical perspective is instructive. CRM is still relatively young. It emerged during the rise of personal computers. It was a time where personal productivity was becoming vogue. At this time a plethora of software products were being designed to serve individual users but these programs did not have much to do with CRM. These early management systems were designed to automate a single segment of the customer life cycle. It wasn’t yet common knowledge at the time that an improved way to offer customers a seamless view is to integrate all tasks in order to provide a cohesive process. Today businesses know that in order to achieve a seamless flow of information a good integration strategy is required. A study conducted by Frederick Reichheld showed that dramatic increase in profits stemmed from small increases in the rate of a customer retention. Other studies report that repeat customers generate over twice as much gross income than new customers (Winer 2001). On the whole, the school of thought has changed from customer acquisition to retention, but it took several years for this goal to be actualized through the use of capable CRM

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