Chapter 3. What Is CRM?
People make buying decisions. People have loyalties. Relationships can only be developed between people. Your Customer Relationship Management program must be structured around this well-known fact. CRM is about people. CRM is an approach to organizing your company's interactions with customers that starts with a customer-centered point of view. It's an entire discipline, not a single activity. It's true that in the business-to-business marketplace, company descriptors such as size, industry, financial status, and purchasing power are critical to understanding and characterizing the people who work there. We will discuss the special case of B2B CRM later on in this chapter. In Figure 3-1, we begin to paint the picture of our CRM vision – a customer-centered organization.
Figure 3-1. CRM provides a customer-centered view.
This viewpoint ensures that the company's plans, activities, and communications that directly touch the customer will be seen as an integrated whole that supports your company's brand promise. We are now ready to establish our working definition for CRM.