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Introduction
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), as the name implies, is the management of a company's relationships with its customers and is defined by Gartner as:
"An enterprise-wide business strategy designed to optimize profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction by organizing the enterprise around customer segments, fostering customer-satisfying behaviors and linking processes from customers through suppliers."
In the fiercely competitive world of business today, as revenue and profits are being eroded and churn becomes the norm, CRM programs have taken on more importance.
CRM puts customers at the heart of the business and focuses on people, processes, and technology to create win/win relationships with customers, decrease churn, improve customer retention and loyalty, and help create sustainable competitive advantage.
CRM is a strategy that focuses on a collaborative customer-centric approach. It enables employees, partners, suppliers, and customers to leverage fully integrated information from the entire enterprise to tie CRM functionality closely with e-commerce, supply chain, and business intelligence "to create a holistic circle of commerce."
In the past, many companies initiated CRM programs but did not fully reap the intended benefits due to a number of issues that challenge CRM adoption and successful implementation.