1. Operational CRM provides support to front office business processes which includes sales and marketing and customer service. Here, each interaction with the customer is added to the customer’s contact history, which can be retrieved by the staff as and when required. Usually call centers use some kind of CRM to support their agents.
2. Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers. Usually this can include a variety of channels, such as internet, email, automated phone (Automated Voice Response AVR). Generally it can be equated with “self service”.
3. Analytical CRM deals with complete end to end analysis of customer data including customer preferences, demographic details, etc. Mainly this is done for optimization of market effectiveness.
Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) helps an organization by enabling its marketing department to identify and target prospects, manage campaigns with set goals and objectives and generate quality leads for the sales department. It also assists in improving tele-sales and overall sales management besides ensuring formation of customized relationships with customers with an aim of providing quality customer service, profitably.
An organization interacts with it’s customers in different ways including mail campaigns, Web sites, brick-and-mortar stores, call centers, mobile sales force staff and marketing and advertising efforts. The CRM systems link up each of these touch points. All the collected data flows between operational systems (like sales and inventory systems) and analytical systems that can help sort through these records for patterns. The analysts can then comb through the data to obtain a holistic view of each customer and pinpoint areas where better services are needed.
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