2.3 Customer Relationship Management

New business theory tells us that the customer has the highest priority in any company. If there are no customers there is no company. The company has to be build around the customer. Everything has to be done to fullfill the needs and wishes of the customer. The customer is in the centre and not the company itself [15].

Customer Relationship Management itself has different parts like, service, marketing, and sales.

Customer data has to be central. All information about the customer has to be stored in only one place. Every person within the company has to have access to an up-to-date real time customer database. The customer information must be 100% complete. The customer has to be able to access the company through any channels (and vice versa) like telephone, personal contact, fax, web, e-mail, mobile services.

It is important that the information about the customer is consistent. Some examples help to visualise the needs for customer relationship management systems.

• The customer calls the call centre. The person in the call centre has up-to-date information about the customer. e.g the employee sees, that the customer called yesterday about a problem. The call centre person could greet the customer by name and ask if he could solve the problem with the product.
• The person in the call centre sees that the customer has product number X and makes the customer aware that there is a free upgrade if he/she wishes to get it by mail.
• The employee interacting with the customer sees that the customer has product Y and sees that the company has a new product which supercedes product Y and asks the customer if he/she wants to get some more information on the new product.
• The customer logs to the web site and gets his personalised web-interface. On the interface there might be important information about updates of products or some special offers tailored for this individual customer according its individual composition of products.

The main message of CRM is: Its all about your customers.