Update May 2020: With the current situation on COVID-19 Pandemic, Online ERP is a viable solution to help businesses to run management of main business processes online. Administration can be managed even if your staffs are WFH, click here for WGSHub’s curated selection of ERPs.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one form of application of Information Technology (IT) in the sales or marketing department of a company. But the idea or the breath of CRM itself is none other than the services.
What is CRM?
After the digital era that always uses the “e” in front of all the words such as e-commerce, e-book, e-Sales, e-mail, etc., Customer Relationship Management or CRM is an acronym or abbreviation that is most popular among people of sales and marketing.
Customer in English dictionary meaning a person who repeatedly or regularly makes a purchase to a dealer. So the customer is a person (in this definition does not mention about the satisfaction, expensive-cheap purchase, etc.). The second word, “relationship” is a form of two-way communication between buyers and sellers. Management, the last word, means the management (broadly without the need to spell out the details of how to manage something). So the above definition is combined roughly into the two-way relationships between the management of a company with people who become customers of the company.
CRM in its development can also be defined as follows:
- CRM is an IT industry term for methodologies, strategies, software and or other web-based applications that can help a company, or
- CRM is a business of a company to concentrate on keeping the customer (so they will not run into a competitor) to collect all forms of customer interaction either via phone, email, feedback on the site, or the outcome of talks with the sales and marketing staff.
What is CRM have to do with IT or computer technology in general? Clearly, IT is the most important part (but not the first) of CRM because, without a reliable computer technology capabilities to process the amount of information collected, CRM will be paralyzed and has no meaning.
Open source CRM will indeed disrupt the existing (commercial, closed-source) business applications software industry. If you read a March 2011 article by Gartner where the analyst firm surveyed 547 IT leaders in 11 countries and found that “more than half of our survey respondents have adopted OSS [open source software] solutions as part of their IT strategy.
In fact, OSS makes up nearly one-third of responding organizations overall enterprise software portfolio, which is interestingly enough, about the same as the proportion of internally developed software.” Another interesting finding was that increased adoption of open-source software was not just about saving money, although that was a factor, other important objectives such as faster acquisition, increased flexibility, improved innovation, and shorter development cycles played heavily into the decision making process. It is only a matter of time before open-source disrupts the business apps software industry.
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