A Practical Guide to CRM: Building More Profitable Customer Relationships

Description

A business's existing profitable customers are the key to its future success. This is accepted marketing wisdom, but it is something to which many companies just pay lip service. In the past, companies were undoubtedly held back by the lack of effective systems. However, over the last few years new technologies, known collectively as customer relationship management or CRM, have come into their own. They are now sufficiently robust and flexible to enable companies to collect, store, and analyze data about their customers. This book shows how CRM (customer relationship management) technology is designed to collect, store, and analyze data about customers, in order to optimize marketing, sales, and customer service - as well as back-office operations and new product development. The author explains how CRM starts out as a means of linking the different customer-facing functions in a company, and how it ends up changing the way the entire company thinks about customers: who they are, what they want and how they can be better served.

Janice Reynolds is a writer, editor, speaker, and consultant in information technology and the Internet/intranet. Prior to starting her own consulting firm in 1995, Ms. Reynolds was the litigation manager of a large New York City law firm. She is the author of The Complete E-Commerce Book. She has edited numerous technical books and led several e-commerce development teams. Ms. Reynolds provides advice to numerous budding entrepreneurs as the 'E-commerce Expert' on Allbusiness.com. She also consults with established companies concerning their technical needs.