CRM and Customer Life Cycle

Customer Relationship Management or CRM is aEnhancementsCRM helps companies better
combination of enterprise strategies, businessunderstand existing customers' needs and behaviors
processes and information technologies used to learnand enhance the profitability from existing customers
more about customers' needs and behaviors in orderby cross-selling. They can customize their products
to develop stronger relationships with them. CRMand services to individual customers' needs and
software systems automate many customer-relatedpreferences.Customer RetentionCustomer service
business tasks.CRM applications are traditionallymodule of CRM system gives the organizations the
developed as client-server software which incursedge in customer support and call center services.
higher initial cost of ownership. The proliferation ofThey can increase customer satisfaction while
the Internet and the Web has fueled the rapidreducing the cost of support. Customer retention is
growth of Web-based CRM or online CRMcritical to the overall profitability of an organization. A
applications. Web CRM systems are widely deployedcustomer you spend hundreds of dollars and months
for web based call center, contact management,to acquire may leave you in seconds as a result of
trouble ticket, personal information manager andpoor customer services.Copyright 2005, Bruce
scheduling.The life cycle of CRM consists of threeZhangBruce Zhang has over 10 years experiences in
phases - customer acquisition, customer relationshipdeveloping and implementing ecommerce and
enhancements and customer retention. CRMebusiness systems in various industries. He has
software streamlines CRM activities at each phase ofcreated a news aggregator that automatically
customer relationship management.Customerextracts CRM news and new articles from over 50
AcquisitionContact management module and directsources daily to help corporate executives, IT
marketing module of CRM allow companies toprofessionals and consultants to keep up with the
effectively promote and market their products andlatest development in enterprise software market.
services to prospects. Those modules help speed upThe website offers a knowledge base for
the acquiring processes and reduce the cost ofunderstanding CRM software from a systems
acquiring new customers.Customer Relationshipperspective.