ACRIP
Essentials of CRM
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Essentials of CRM

A Guide to Customer Relationship Management

Bryan Bergeron
Wiley, 2002
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Never has a business trend been more popular, more expensive and less understood than customer relationship management, or CRM. The costs of CRM can be astronomical, and while the benefits also can be great, they are often less easily to predict, due to the complexity of the systems. Byron Bergeron breaks down CRM into its component parts, and in so doing, helps the reader grasp just what makes the price so high, and why it might all be worthwhile. In his discussion, Bergeron touches on the major suppliers of CRM technology, the need for employee training, implementation issues, and virtually every other factor an executive might need to consider in evaluating whether or not to undertake a CRM program. getAbstract.com highly recommends this comprehensive work.

Summary

CRM: The What and Why

Even though the U.S. economy has transformed itself into a service economy, customer satisfaction with regard to service has never been lower. Why? Many companies have placed their emphasis on cost savings at the expense of customer service. This has occurred at the same time that technological improvements have increased customer expectations. In particular, the dot-com boom created unrealistically high expectations on the part of consumers, since so many Internet companies offered free or heavily subsidized services. In this highly competitive environment, the need for customer relationship management (CRM) is acute.

Essentially, CRM improves the relationships between people, including suppliers and customers of goods and services. CRM emerged in 1997 as a method of bolstering the customer-company relationship by using computer-based tools to gather information about customers’ wants and needs in order to allow companies to better service them. For instance, by recording every interaction with a customer through online transactions, you can create a database of customer preferences, and all departments in your company can review them to develop...

About the Author

Bryan Bergeron has spent the last 30 years designing and working with computers and electronics. He teaches at Harvard Medical School and MIT and serves as Editor in Chief of eMD and technical editor of Postgraduate Medicine. He is also on the editorial boards of Healthcare Informatics and Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, among others. He is the author of several books on business and technology.

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