Управление взаимоотношениями с клиентами: история и современные тенденции

Process of managing interactions with customers

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a range of different communication channels, including a company's website, telephone (which many software come with a softphone), email, live chat, marketing materials and more recently, social media. They allow businesses to learn more about their target audiences and how to better cater to their needs, thus retaining customers and driving sales growth. CRM may be used with past, present or potential customers. The concepts, procedures, and rules that a corporation follows when communicating with its consumers are referred to as CRM. This complete connection covers direct contact with customers, such as sales and service related operations, forecasting, and the analysis of consumer patterns and behaviors, from the perspective of the company. According to Gartner, the global CRM market size is estimated at $69 billion in 2020.

The concept of customer relationship management started in the early 1970s, when customer satisfaction was evaluated using annual surveys or by front line asking. At that time, businesses had to rely on standalone mainframe systems to automate sales, but the extent of technology allowed them to categorize customers in spreadsheets and lists. One of the best known precursors of modern day CRM is the Farley File. Developed by Franklin Roosevelt's campaign manager, James Farley, the Farley File was a comprehensive set of records detailing political and personal facts about people FDR and Farley met or were supposed to meet. Using it, people that FDR met were impressed by his "recall" of facts about their family and what they were doing professionally and politically. In 1982, Kate and Robert D. Kestenbaum introduced the concept of database marketing, namely applying statistical methods to analyze and gather customer data. By 1986, Pat Sullivan and Mike Muhney had released a customer evaluation system called ACT! based on the principle of a digital Rolodex, which offered a contact management service for the first time. The trend was followed by numerous companies and independent developers trying to maximize lead potential, including Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems, who designed the first CRM product, Siebel Customer Relationship Management, in 1993. In order to compete with these new and quickly growing stand alone CRM solutions, established enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies like Oracle, Zoho Corporation, SAP, Peoplesoft (an Oracle subsidiary as of 2005) and Navision started extending their sales, distribution and customer service capabilities with embedded CRM modules. This included embedding sales force automation or extended customer service (e. g. inquiry, activity management) as CRM features in their ERP. Customer relationship management was popularized in 1997, due to the work of Siebel, Gartner, and IBM. Between 1997 and 2000, leading CRM products were enriched with shipping and marketing capabilities. Siebel introduced the first mobile CRM app called Siebel Sales Handheld in 1999. The idea of a stand alone, cloud hosted customer base was soon adopted by other leading providers at the time, including PeopleSoft (acquired by Oracle),

The first open source CRM system was developed by SugarCRM in 2004. During this period, CRM was rapidly migrating to the cloud, as a result of which it became accessible to sole entrepreneurs and small teams. This increase in accessibility generated a huge wave of price reduction. In 2013 and 2014, most of the popular CRM products were linked to business intelligence systems and communication software to improve corporate communication and end users' experience. The leading trend is to replace standardized CRM solutions with industry specific ones, or to make them customizable enough to meet the needs of every business. In November 2016, Forrester released a report where it "identified the nine most significant CRM suites from eight prominent vendors".

Strategic CRM concentrates upon the development of a customer centric business culture. The focus of a business on being customer centric (in design and implementation of their CRM strategy) will translate into an improved CLV.

The primary goal of CRM systems is integration and automation of sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a single customer view, a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more, summarizing all of the relationships between the customer and the firm. Operational CRM is made up of 3 main components: sales force automation, marketing automation, and service automation. Sales force automation works with all stages in the sales cycle, from initially entering contact information to converting a prospective client into an actual client. It implements sales promotion analysis, automates the tracking of a client's account history for repeated sales or future sales and coordinates sales, marketing, call centers, and retail outlets. It prevents duplicate efforts between a salesperson and a customer and also automatically tracks all contacts and follow ups between both parties. Marketing automation focuses on easing the overall marketing process to make it more effective and efficient. CRM tools with marketing automation capabilities can automate repeated tasks, for example, sending out automated marketing emails at certain times to customers, or posting marketing information on social media. The goal with marketing automation is to turn a sales lead into a full customer. CRM systems today also work on customer engagement through social media. Service automation is the part of the CRM system that focuses on direct customer service technology. Through service automation, customers are supported through multiple channels such as phone, email, knowledge bases, ticketing portals, FAQs, and more. Analytical CRM systems use techniques such as data mining, correlation, and pattern recognition to analyze customer data. These analytics help improve customer service by finding small problems which can be solved, perhaps by marketing to different parts of a consumer audience differently.

A customer data platform (CDP) is a computer system used by marketing departments that assembles data about individual people from various sources into one database, with which other software systems can interact.

Research has found a 5% increase in customer retention boosts lifetime customer profits by 50% on average across multiple industries, as well as a boost of up to 90% within specific industries such as insurance. Companies that have mastered customer relationship strategies have the most successful CRM programs. For example, MBNA Europe has had a 75% annual profit growth since 1995. The firm heavily invests in screening potential cardholders. Once proper clients are identified, the firm retains 97% of its profitable customers. They implement CRM by marketing the right products to the right customers. The firm's customers' card usage is 52% above the industry norm, and the average expenditure is 30% more per transaction. Also 10% of their account holders ask for more information on cross sale products. Customer or consumer profiles are the essences of the data that is collected alongside core data (name, address, company) and processed through customer analytics methods, essentially a type of profiling. The three basic methods of customer profiling are the psychographic approach, the consumer typology approach, and the consumer characteristics approach. These customer profiling methods help you design your business around who your customers are and help you make better customer centered decisions.

Consultants hold that it is important for companies to establish strong CRM systems to improve their relational intelligence. According to this argument, a company must recognize that people have many different types of relationships with different brands. One research study analyzed relationships between consumers in China, Germany, Spain, and the United States, with over 200 brands in 11 industries including airlines, cars, and media. This information is valuable as it provides demographic, behavioral, and value based customer segmentation. These types of relationships can be both positive and negative. Some customers view themselves as friends of the brands, while others as enemies, and some are mixed with a love hate relationship with the brand. Some relationships are distant, intimate, or anything in between. Many companies do not properly make use of this great amount of data, however. All of these are signs of what types of relationships the customer wants with the firm, and therefore companies may consider investing more time and effort in building out their relational intelligence.

Many firms have also implemented training programs to teach employees how to recognize and create strong customer brand relationships. Other employees have also been trained in social psychology and the social sciences to help bolster customer relationships. Customer service representatives must be trained to value customer relationships and trained to understand existing customer profiles. Even the finance and legal departments should understand how to manage and build relationships with customers.

Contact centre CRM providers are popular for small and mid market businesses. These systems codify the interactions between the company and customers by using analytics and key performance indicators to give the users information on where to focus their marketing and customer service. This allows agents to have access to a caller's history to provide personalized customer communication. The intention is to maximize average revenue per user, decrease churn rate and decrease idle and unproductive contact with the customers. Growing in popularity is the idea of gamifying, or using game design elements and game principles in a non game environment such as customer service environments. The gamification of customer service environments includes providing elements found in games like rewards and bonus points to customer service representatives as a method of feedback for a job well done. Gamification tools can motivate agents by tapping into their desire for rewards, recognition, achievements, and competition.

Contact center automation, CCA, the practice of having an integrated system that coordinates contacts between an organization and the public, is designed to reduce the repetitive and tedious parts of a contact center agent's job. Automation prevents this by having pre recorded audio messages that help customers solve their problems. For example, an automated contact center may be able to re route a customer through a series of commands asking him or her to select a certain number to speak with a particular contact center agent who specializes in the field in which the customer has a question. Software tools can also integrate with the agent's desktop tools to handle customer questions and requests. This also saves time on behalf of the employees. Because the public, especially young people, are increasingly using social networking sites, companies use

Some CRM systems integrate social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to track and communicate with customers. These customers also share their own opinions and experiences with a company's products and services, giving these firms more insight. Therefore, these firms can both share their own opinions and also track the opinions of their customers.

CRM systems can also include technologies that create geographic marketing campaigns. The systems take in information based on a customer's physical location and sometimes integrates it with popular location based GPS applications. It can be used for networking or contact management as well to help increase sales based on location. The main differences between business to consumer (B2C) and business to business CRM systems concern aspects like sizing of contact databases and length of relationships.

In the Gartner CRM Summit 2010 challenges like "system tries to capture data from social networking traffic like Twitter, handles Facebook page addresses or other online social networking sites" were discussed and solutions were provided that would help in bringing more clientele. The era of the "social customer" refers to the use of social media by customers.

Some CRM systems are equipped with mobile capabilities, making information accessible to remote sales staff.

Many CRM vendors offer subscription based web tools (cloud computing) and SaaS. Salesforce. com was the first company to provide enterprise applications through a web browser, and has maintained its leadership position. Traditional providers moved into the cloud based market via acquisitions of smaller providers: Oracle purchased RightNow in October 2011, and Taleo and Eloqua in 2012; SAP acquired SuccessFactors in December 2011 and NetSuite acquired Verenia in 2022.

Sales forces also play an important role in CRM, as maximizing sales effectiveness and increasing sales productivity is a driving force behind the adoption of CRM software. Some of the top CRM trends identified in 2021 include focusing on customer service automation such as chatbots, hyper personalization based on customer data and insights, and the use of unified CRM systems. CRM vendors support sales productivity with different products, such as tools that measure the effectiveness of ads that appear in 3D video games. Pharmaceutical companies were some of the first investors in sales force automation (SFA) and some are on their third or fourth generation implementations. However, until recently, the deployments did not extend beyond SFA—limiting their scope and interest to Gartner analysts.

Another related development is vendor relationship management (VRM), which provide tools and services that allow customers to manage their individual relationship with vendors. VRM development has grown out of efforts by ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Identity Commons' Internet Identity Workshops, as well as by a growing number of startups and established companies. VRM was the subject of a cover story in the May 2010 issue of CRM Magazine.

Another trend worth noting is the rise of Customer Success as a discipline within companies. More and more companies establish Customer Success teams as separate from the traditional Sales team and task them with managing existing customer relations. This trend fuels demand for additional capabilities for a more holistic understanding of customer health, which is a limitation for many existing vendors in the space. As a result, a growing number of new entrants enter the market while existing vendors add capabilities in this area to their suites.

In 2017, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics were identified as the newest trends in CRM.

Companies face large challenges when trying to implement CRM systems. Consumer companies frequently manage their customer relationships haphazardly and unprofitably. They may not effectively or adequately use their connections with their customers, due to misunderstandings or misinterpretations of a CRM system's analysis. Clients may be treated like an exchange party, rather than a unique individual, due to, occasionally, a lack of a bridge between the CRM data and the CRM analysis output. Many studies show that customers are frequently frustrated by a company's inability to meet their relationship expectations, and on the other side, companies do not always know how to translate the data they have gained from CRM software into a feasible action plan. Many corporations only use CRM systems on a partial or fragmented basis. In a 2007 survey from the UK, four fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they had installed. Forty three percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of their existing systems. However, market research regarding consumers' preferences may increase the adoption of CRM among developing countries' consumers. Collection of customer data such as personally identifiable information must strictly obey customer privacy laws, which often requires extra expenditures on legal support. Part of the paradox with CRM stems from the challenge of determining exactly what CRM is and what it can do for a company. The CRM paradox, also referred to as the "dark side of CRM", may entail favoritism and differential treatment of some customers. This can happen because a business prioritizes customers who are more profitable, more relationship orientated or tend to have increased loyalty to the company. Although focusing on such customers by itself isn't a bad thing, it can leave other customers feeling left out and alienated potentially decreasing profits because of it. CRM technologies can easily become ineffective if there is no proper management, and they are not implemented correctly. The data sets must also be connected, distributed, and organized properly so that the users can access the information that they need quickly and easily. Research studies also show that customers are increasingly becoming dissatisfied with contact center experiences due to lags and wait times. They also request and demand multiple channels of communication with a company, and these channels must transfer information seamlessly. Therefore, it is increasingly important for companies to deliver a cross channel customer experience that can be both consistent as well as reliable.