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Chapter 12 • Customer Relationship Management 339

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT The key goal of campaign management is to generate “leads” or
potential clients for the organization. It involves planning, realization, control, and monitoring of
relationships aimed at current and potential customers. Today’s marketing campaigns require
individualized or segmented contacts with the consumers with a feedback channel for consumers
to interact.

SALES MANAGEMENT The goal of sales management is to convert the lead generated by cam-
paign management into a potential customer. It requires a thorough understanding of the cus-
tomers’ needs and provides alternatives to satisfy their requirements and to close the deal.

SERVICE MANAGEMENT The goal of service management is to provide ongoing support for
the client and to assist in the operation of the product or service purchased by the customer (e.g.,
through help desk support or contract or billing support). The underlying objective is to maintain
an ongoing relationship with the customers, making sure they remain satisfied and will potentially
buy more products or services in the future.

COMPLAINT MANAGEMENT Sale of products or services often creates dissatisfaction with
consumers that needs to be monitored and managed effectively. The goal is to improve customer
satisfaction by directly addressing the complaint of the customer and supporting a continuous
improvement process to increase customer retention in the long run.

CRM Support Processes
The customer support processes focus on supporting activities with customer contact rather
than facilitating direct customer contact. These include market research, loyalty management,
and others.

MARKET RESEARCH Market research focuses on systematic design, collection, analysis, and
9
reporting of data, and on findings relevant to specific sales activity in an organization. This
process involves integration of external and internal data from a wide variety of sources.
LOYALTY MANAGEMENT In today’s market, with increasing competition and decreasing cus-
tomer loyalty, loyalty management provides the processes to optimize the duration and intensity
of relationships with customers. It can increase the switching costs of the customers by provid-
ing incentives like the frequent-flyer programs or churn management tools, which provide early
warning on customers planning to switch to competitors.

CRM Analysis Processes

These back-end processes collect, consolidate, and analyze customer knowledge collected from
other CRM processes. The knowledge generated from these processes provides support to such
customer contact processes as campaign management and loyalty management, thereby improv-
ing their effectiveness.

9 Kotler, P. (2003). Marketing Management, 11 ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.