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340 Chapter 12 • Customer Relationship Management

LEAD MANAGEMENT The focus of this process is on organizing and prioritizing contacts with
the prospective customers. It involves integration with campaign management and service
management, as well as customer profiling. A sub process of lead management is customer
scoring, which uses quantitative and qualitative measures to rank the customer based on his or
her interest in the product or service. This filtering process allows for more precise target marketing,
and it lowers the contact costs.

CUSTOMER PROFILING The focus of this process is to develop a marketing profile of every
customer by observing his or her buying patterns, demographics, buying and communication
preferences, and other information that allows categorization of the customer. The knowledge
generated from this process feeds into campaign management, sales management, service
management, and the other processes discussed earlier. In addition, this process allows more
individualized contact with the customer.

FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT A good CRM requires a closed-knowledge management loop
that consolidates, analyzes, and shares the customer information collected by CRM delivery
and support processes with the analysis process, and vice versa. The loop can provide a road
map for continuous improvement process for the company’s products and services. A good
system will discard unnecessary data and focus mainly on the knowledge useful for making
better decisions.

CRM TECHNOLOGY

The two key technologies applicable to customer service are CRM and call center technologies.
Even though call center technology focuses on facilitating better communication between a
customer and the telephone operator, CRM technology implements a companywide business
strategy in an effort to reduce costs and enhance service by solidifying customer loyalty. There is
a wide variety of CRM software in the marketplace. 10 With the rise of the Internet, data mining
and analytics techniques have advanced to where they can be considered an integral component
of CRM. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization
(and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each
customer in real time. This allows customer-facing employees in customer support to make
quick, yet informed, decisions in resolving customer problems and issues. On one end you have
call center technology being sold as CRM, and on the other extreme you have knowledge
management systems also being sold as CRM software. How can you go about deciding what
deserves your time and attention?

CRM Components
CRM is typically associated with so-called front-office functions (e.g., marketing, sales, customer
service, and knowledge management, which includes data analysis, mining, and knowledge
sharing) as shown in Figure 12-2.

10 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CRM_software (accessed January 15, 2007).