What Is CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and MARKETING to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target MARKETING strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

 CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.

Once thought of as a type of software, CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organization. There are three key elements to a successful CRM initiative: people, process, and technology. The people throughout a company-from the CEO to each and every customer service rep-need to buy in to and support CRM. A company's business processes must be reengineered to bolster its CRM initiative, often from the view of, How can this process better serve the customer? Firms must select the right technology to drive these improved processes, provide the best data to the employees, and be easy enough to operate that users won't balk. If one of these three foundations is not sound, the entire CRM structure will crumble.

It's a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, MARKETING effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood. As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behavior and value of customers. This insight allows for improved customer service, increased call center efficiency, added cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and MARKETING processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

Customer Relationship Management

6 Steps From Customer Service by Susan and Derek Nash One of the ongoing challenges successful businesses face is in optimizing customer satisfaction and developing Customer Relationship Management. So many companies "jump on the bandwagon" of improving customer service in order to impact customer retention levels. Yet, since 1994, customer satisfaction has dropped in nearly every sector of the economy according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index compiled by the University of Michigan. So why is this? Raising customer satisfaction levels requires a comprehensive systems approach. This article will cover: The importance of a clear customer experience strategy Selecting the correct people Developing, motivating and managing your people Establishing effective service delivery processes Building in continuous improvement Ensuring managers are the key change-agents

Customer Relationship Management Experts Susan and Derek Nash Susan and Derek Nash are joint owners of EM-Power, Inc. a consulting firm that works with a wide range of Fortune 500 organizations implementing customer relationship management strategies and developing effective leaders. They are authors of "Deliver Outstanding Service", and "Delighting your Customer" all published by How To Books. Contact Susan and Derek

Setting A Clear Customer Experience Strategy

Often organisations confuse defining a customer experience strategy with creating a "slogan". How many companies create a slogan without any supporting initiatives, thereby disillusioning employees and creating a "flavour of the month?"

To establish a good strategy certain key practices are required:

• Understand the overall organisational vision and mission
• Define the organisation's customer service direction, slogan and values
• Ensure customer service is defined as a key responsibility for the business/department
• Share the customer experience strategy via a comprehensive communications program
• Ensure that this strategy does not conflict with other business strategies. As consultants, it is amazing how often we hear organisations say, "Improving Customer Service is a priority, and we are also introducing stringent cost-cutting measures." This can present a tough dichotomy.

Selecting The Correct People

It's really hard to teach an elephant to dance!

When recruiting employees to provide customer service, the process often tends to concentrate more on functional expertise, technical competence and knowledge rather than interpersonal skills. However, lack of the right attitude can drastically impact client satisfaction levels. Research has in fact shown that attitude is the most important requirement: skills and functional expertise can be taught.

Therefore in selecting the right people:

• Define the critical job requirements
• Develop scenario-based interviews/assessment centres to screen and select candidates
• Involve multiple team members in the hiring process
• Ensure evaluation is based on objective, not the subjective "Be Like Me" criteria

In part two of this article, we will look at the remaining four key principles of making the transition from a customer service culture to customer relationship management

Best Practice: Requirements of CRM Processes

2012-09-24
It is imperative that companies have detailed knowledge of the behavior, needs, and hidden potential of their current and prospective customers – which they can apply to identify and take resolute actions for boosting revenues and income. Such knowledge can be gained primarily by:

• Expanding actionable knowledge, and systematically strengthening relationships with customers
• Contacting and caring for customers in a consistent manner
• Obtaining and applying information that is company and channel neutral
• Systematizing and optimizing customer-centric activities through the customer lifecycle

The requirements of CRM processes concern how to offer and provide services to customers, in order to maximize their level of satisfaction.
In this article, we address:

• The requirements that companies define for CRM processes in marketing, sales, and service
• How to analyze processes in a sound and structured manner and define requirements
• The success factors to consider in practice when defining the requirements of customer processes.

Put the customer in the spotlight
Most companies these days are quite opaque when it comes to the area of precise customer requirements. Achieving transparency on this facet alone would be a big leap forward in integrating customer requirements into company processes.
The key to success is to focus on processes that customers consider important. A strategic approach is necessary to identify such processes. This means conducting a top-down analysis to identify customer groups, their contact points, and long-term requirements. Although this may sound obvious, most companies underestimate the task at hand and are thus snowed under when trying to accomplish it. A strategic approach enables one to determine the weak points and incorporate the customer needs properly and on time into the required processes.
Customer processes are intertwined with the target groups and lifecycles – hence, they cannot be identified and analyzed in isolation. For instance, when launching a new product for group A customers, it may be important to quickly provide detailed information. This would mean focusing primarily on marketing processes like campaign management and sales processes like visiting the customers. For group B, on the other hand, it may be more significant to emphasize easy access to the service hotline and handle complaints promptly. This would mean highlighting services like queries and complaints management. From a corporate perspective too, the goals to be achieved will differ, for example, “ensure multichannel communications at all times,” or “provide good access via the call center,” or “make all employees aware of customer preferences and customer histories,” or “clearly define processes for managing complaints

In March of 2013, Microsoft officially supported access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM on Apple’s iPad platform through the Safari web browser.  The following section discusses which devices are supported and on which platforms, as well as the features and limitations of the original release.

Supported environments/devices

For the server component, iPad access to Dynamics CRM is limited to CRM Online.  It is not currently supported for on-premise customers. Additionally, CRM Online customers need to accept the product update from the Settings -> Administration page of CRM Online.

On the client side, iPad access to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online requires IOS6.0 and above.  This eliminates the 1st generation iPad from consideration as Apple currently limits the IOS to version 5.1 and has no plans to update the 1st generation to IOS6.  Additionally, iPad support is limited to the full size iPad as the iPad Mini is not supported.  On full-sized iPad’s with IOS 5.1 or older operating systems, the user is redirected to Mobile Express automatically.  Users with the iPad mini are not redirected to Mobile Express.

Features

The following features are supported:

General optimizations. To optimize the experience on the iPad, Microsoft included several features and enhancements.  For starters, both landscape and portrait mode is supported.  To save space and reduce the number of popups, the ribbon bar and help visor were removed.  In addition to limiting the number of popups, many remaining popups were flattened including entity lookups.

Dashboards. As with out of the box CRM Online, the dashboard page is your initial landing spot.   You can customize your default dashboard and easily switch between dashboards with the dashboard picker.  The dashboards fully render inside Safari and you also have drill down capabilities into each chart as you do in the web client.  Unfortunately, you are not able to create new dashboards at this time.

What Is CRM Software?

The primary purpose of CRM software, sometimes known as contact management software, is to consolidate customer information into one repository, so users can better organize and manage relationships. Additionally, these applications automate common processes and provide tools for monitoring performance and productivity. Systems vary, but the best CRM software will include at least the following four core functions:

• Customer Data Management: Most products provide a searchable database to store customer information (such as contact information) and relevant documents (such as sales proposals and contracts).
• Interaction Tracking: These systems document conversations held by phone, in person, through email or other channels. These interactions can be logged manually, or automated with phone and email system integrations. Depending on the product, some systems can also track interactions on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.
• Workflow Automation: This standardizes business processes, usually through a combination of task lists, calendars, alerts and templates. Once a task is checked off as complete, for example, the system might automatically set a task for the next step in the process.
• Reporting: Management can use these CRM tools to track performance and productivity based on activities logged in the CRM system--for instance, how many new contacts were added to the database that day, or how much revenue was generated. These tools can also be used for forecasting, such as for the next-quarter sales pipeline.

Differences between CRM for B2B

Differences between CRM for B2B (Business 2 Business) and B2C (Business 2 Customers)[edit]

B2B and B2C marketing operates differently, that is why they cannot use the same software. All the differences are focused on the approach of these two types of businesses:

• B2B companies have smaller contact databases than B2C
• The amount of sales in B2B is relatively small
• In B2B there is less figure propositions, but in some cases they cost a lot more than B2C items
• Relationships in B2B environment are built over a longer time

B2B operations require special CRM solutions that are not the same as for the B2C industry:

• B2B industries require specialized CRM solutions, which are different from B2C companies’ requirements. This is the main reason for ineffective adoption of applications, despite both B2B and B2C industries having the same aim: to “understand its own customers better”
• There must be different CRM solutions for industries within the B2B market, because of the special needs of each one. Also there is a demand of designing solutions using special color schemes.
• B2B CRM must be easily integrated with other companies’ IT-solutions. Such integration enables the creation of forecasts about customer behavior based on their buying history, bills, business success, etc.
• An application for a B2B company must have a function to connect all the contacts, processes and deals among the customers segment and then prepare a paper
• Automation of sales process is an important requirement for B2B solutions. It should effectively manage the deal and progress it through all the phases towards signing
• A crucial point is personalization. It helps the B2B company to save strong and long-lasting relationships with the customer. To communicate with them more effectively, there should be integration with the email solutions

So, all the B2B applications must be both personalized and be able to establish communication channels for support of customers

                                  how to tackle the customer

Steps

1. 
   1
   Keep smiling.
   • It's important to remain polite and professional no matter how belligerent a customer gets. Keeping a smile on your face will help keep your attitude neutral and polite if you're dealing with the customer in person and make your voice sound pleasant over the phone. Also while you smile keep your ear and mind on the issue stated.
   
   
2. 
   2
   Let the customers talk. Ask leading questions to allow the customer to talk more so you can gather more "facts".
   • Rude customers could be acting that way because they feel mistreated, cheated or, possibly, the customer service they've received in the past was unsatisfactory. Handle rude customers by letting them get rid of some of that negative energy. Avoid interrupting ranting customers unless they become verbally abusive. This will make them angrier.
3. 
   3
   Apologize to the customer but also assure them you validate their concerns.
   • Tell the customers you're sorry they are upset or you're sorry they had a bad experience. This lets the customers feel that you're listening and are sympathetic without admitting any wrongdoing on behalf of yourself or your company. It will defuse the rudeness so you can get to the real problem.
4. 
   4
   Maintain a neutral tone of voice.
   • Raising your voice in anger or to talk over a customer will only result in a shouting match and won't resolve anything. Maintain even breaths in and out and focus on keeping your voice calm and composed when you speak to the customer.
5. 
   5
   Get to the issue.
   • The real problem is at the heart of the customer's rudeness. Jot down notes while the customer is talking so you can direct the conversation toward resolving the real issue. Listening actively for the reason behind the customer's rudeness will help you ignore insults and show the customer you can't be affected by rudeness or condescension.
6. 
   6
   Control your emotions.
   • Never yell at a rude customer or start to cry due to a customer's words or behavior. This will cause you to lose control of the situation. Politely put the customer on hold or ask him or her to wait while you ask a supervisor or co worker for assistance if you feel that you're going to be unable to deal with the customer calmly.
7. 
   7
   Counteract the rude behavior.
   • Avoid responding to a customer's rudeness with negative comments. Tell the customer you appreciate his or her honesty and you want to try to make the next experience better. Positive wording will steer the conversation away from angry, rude comments.
8. 
   8
   Remember that it's not personal.
   • The customer is being rude to you in the context of your job, not to you personally. Keep rude comments in the perspective of your job and don't take the customer's comments or actions personally.

CRM CARTOON

crm album

CRM

crm process

 

      BOSCH

Bosch Power Tools is the European market leader in the professional power tools trade, supplying various professional users including the building, electrical and wood working industries. Market research has indicated that a dominant factor influencing consumer purchases of Bosch Power Tools is the experiences and recommendations of current Bosch Professional Power Tools customers. This necessitates the targeting of social media to positively influence and increase recommendations among the existing users of Bosch Power Tools products.

The challenge
As well as a presence on Facebook, Bosch Professional Power Tools uses the ‘Bob Community’ facility run through its website, attracting 460,000 visitors with 35,000 registrations. Bosch Professional Power Tools needed to ascertain whether its investment in Facebook was reaching the desired demographic and how the value of its Facebook fans compared to that of Bob Community users. This information would lead to the appropriate allocation of Bosch Professional Power Tools marketing resources and a focused social media CRM programme.


Solution
Bosch Professional Power Tools was seeking a software tool that would enable an in-depth and bespoke analysis of the audience that its social network was reaching, thus facilitating a greater insight into its users and a clearer interpretation of customer feedback. After researching the market, Bosch Professional Power Tools selected the social insight tool by Globalpark, part of QuestBack, the European industry leader in enterprise feedback management (EFM).

The social insight software collates both qualitative and quantative research to help brands to better understand the individual consumer as well as the market segment targeted. Bosch Professional Power Tools employed the social insight software designed to continuously monitor audience participation with the results potentially influencing future audience interaction, brand strategy and product development.
With social CRM an important instrument in furthering sales of Bosch Professional Power Tools products and understanding the demographics of the audience using social media to communicate to potential customers, it enables Bosch Professional Power Tools to appropriately adjust the financial and human resources that it allocates to each service.  Ivar Kroghrud, CEO of QuestBack commented, “Social media plays an increasing role in today’s communication between brands and customers. Facebook is an amazing channel for building brand awareness and represents a way for people to directly connect with the brands and products they care about. However, organisations are yet to leverage the full potential of this meeting place”.
Social CRM software can fully integrate into the Facebook fan page, combining Facebook users’ profile data and direct feedback from their interactions with the page. This provided Bosch Professional Power Tools with statistical data from its social media CRM programmes through a fully integrated system, constantly analysing the profiles of users.

Results
Bosch Professional Power Tools needed to ascertain who was using its Facebook page and whether this audience differed from that utilising the Bob Community. By dividing the structures of business sectors, Bosch Professional Power Tools was able to quantitatively assess which professional trades used which social media application.
The results highlighted that the wood working trade, among others, had a significant presence on Facebook, enabling Bosch Professional Power Tools to tailor the use of social media within its CRM programme, taking into consideration the EFM results. This targeted specific professional trades, i.e. wood working, with relevant Bosch Professional Power Tools products, through the appropriate social media.
With only 11 per cent of Bosch Professional Power Tools social media audience using both the Bob Community and Facebook, it needed to determine whether the demographics of the Facebook audience were, as it hoped, younger than that of the Bob Community. The resulting analysis revealed that the Facebook page attracted an over proportional number of younger users. It included approximately six hundred apprentices in vocational schools, a market that Bosch Professional Power Tools had been aiming to target.
This data affirmed the need for the continued use of both Facebook and the Bob community to ensure that all demographics and professional trades that Bosch Power Tools sells to are covered through a bespoke and focused social media programme. It has been able to analyse each user on Facebook enabling the generation of new initiatives for future and current customers.

Next steps
Moving forward, Bosch Professional Power Tools aims to target both brand advisors and advocates, the most likely audience to influence potential customers. Brand advisors are particularly accessible through Facebook and with the increased customer knowledge that Bosch Professional Power Tools now has access too; the possibility to rapidly interact with fans to gain feedback on new products and marketing campaigns further strengthens its use of social media as part of its CRM programme.
Tracking the influence of brand advocates comments and reactions will enable it to pinpoint the impact and reception of these opinions facilitating an increase in the focus of the targeted social media. This in turn will create the most value from using social media in a CRM programme, for both Bosch Professional Power Tools and its customers.

crm in all fields

future of crm

How to manage customer relationship

niche marketing and sfa

crm software

What Is CRM Software?

The primary purpose of CRM software, sometimes known as contact management software, is to consolidate customer information into one repository, so users can better organize and manage relationships. Additionally, these applications automate common processes and provide tools for monitoring performance and productivity. Systems vary, but the best CRM software will include at least the following four core functions:

• Customer Data Management: Most products provide a searchable database to store customer information (such as contact information) and relevant documents (such as sales proposals and contracts).
• Interaction Tracking: These systems document conversations held by phone, in person, through email or other channels. These interactions can be logged manually, or automated with phone and email system integrations. Depending on the product, some systems can also track interactions on Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms.
• Workflow Automation: This standardizes business processes, usually through a combination of task lists, calendars, alerts and templates. Once a task is checked off as complete, for example, the system might automatically set a task for the next step in the process.
• Reporting: Management can use these CRM tools to track performance and productivity based on activities logged in the CRM system--for instance, how many new contacts were added to the database that day, or how much revenue was generated. These tools can also be used for forecasting, such as for the next-quarter sales pipeline.

CRM system

CRM Software

An Overview of CRM Software

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the process of managing an organization’s interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle. CRM software applications support the automation of these processes and best practices.

CRM systems vary widely in capabilities, pricing and underlying technology, from basic contact management to sophisticated enterprise suites for sales, service and marketing. Moreover, the market includes industry-specific CRM solutions (e.g., real estate or pharmaceutical sales) and best-of-breed solutions for specific CRM functions (e.g., field service or help desk).

We developed this guide to complement our CRM reviews. The following sections will help potential purchasers find the best customer relationship management software package for their business:

Here’s what we’ll cover:

DETAIL DERIAVATION ABOUT CRM

consumer enironmental factors

Environmental factors		Buyer's black box		Buyer's response
Marketing Stimuli	Environmental Stimuli	Buyer Characteristics	Decision Process
Product Price Place Promotion	Economic Technological Political Cultural Demographic Natural	Attitudes Motivation Perceptions Personality Lifestyle Knowledge	Problem recognition Information search Alternative evaluation Purchase decision Post-purchase behaviour	Product choice Brand choice Dealer choice Purchase timing

crm video

PROCESS OF CRM

Customer experience management

Customer experience management

Customer experience management (CEM or CXM) involves strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the needs of individual customers. Companies have started to focus on the importance of the experience. Jeananne Rae (2006) says that companies are realizing that "building great consumer experiences is a complex enterprise, involving strategy, integration of technology, orchestrating business models, brand management and CEO commitment".^[6]
According to Bernd Schmitt, "the term 'Customer Experience Management' represents the discipline, methodology and/or process used to comprehensively manage a customer's cross-channel exposure, interaction and transaction with a company, product, brand or service."^[7] Note: this is a later definition from Pine and Gilmore's seminal HBR article that defined Customer Experience, Welcome to the Experience Economy. Some authors criticize this as a reworking of what Customer Experience (and hence its management) actually means.
According to James Allen et al. (2005), 80% of businesses state that they offer a "great customer experience". This contrasts starkly with the 8% of customers who feel the same way. Allen et al. assert that businesses must be able to execute what they refer to as the "Three Ds":^[8]

1. designing the correct incentive for the correctly identified consumer, offered in an enticing environment
2. delivery: a company's ability to focus the entire team across various functions to deliver the proposed experience
3. development ultimately determines a company's success, with an emphasis on developing consistency in execution

In this view, a company must constantly teach, train and develop in order to keep up with the constant demands of providing an exceptional customer experience.
According to Harvard Business Review blogger Adam Richardson, a company must define and understand all dimensions of the customer experience in order to have long-term success.^{[9][need quotation to verify]} Some companies segment the customer experience into technical interactions with the customer such as use of the web, smartphone or tablet. Other companies define human interaction such as over-the-phone customer service or face-to-face retail service as the customer experience. In the global economy, where technology and bricks-and-mortar business often interact or even compete for the customer base, it is important to recognize all these aspects as having an impact on the customer experience. Every business offers a customer experience. The more aware a business is of what type of experience they want to offer, the more likely they will create a positive experience

Customer experience

Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods and/or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. This can include awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy. It can also be used to mean an individual experience over one transaction; the distinction is usually clear in context.
However, reviewing the ontology of customer experience, there is a disparity between this 'experience as everything' definition and its original intent i.e., experience as in a personal and memorable experience that critically creates a distinct economic offer different from the goods sold and services delivered (ref: Pine and Gilmore). As the economics of customer experience hang on the 'distinct economic offer' definition, one conclusion some commentators have made is that the 'experience as everything' definition is in fact a reworking of 'service excellence'.
Analysts and commentators who write about customer experience and customer relationship management have increasingly recognized the importance of managing the customer's experience.^[1]
A company's ability to deliver an experience that sets it apart in the eyes of its customers serves to increase the amount of consumer spending with the company and, optimally, inspire loyalty to its brand. "Loyalty," says Jessica Sebor, "is now driven primarily by a company's interaction with its customers and how well it delivers on their wants and needs." (2008)

crm defination

Definition:

CRM is an acronym that stands for Customer Relationship Management. It describes the strategy that a company uses to handle customer interactions. One example of a common CRM strategy is the rewards card program offered by many supermarkets. The store gives its customers a free card that gives them access to special deals and discounts when they swipe the card during checkout. But that card also tracks everything the customer buys and allows the store to create an extremely detailed customer profile based on his or her purchasing habits. Armed with that information, the store can then offer its customers targeted coupons and other programs that will motivate its customers to buy more products from that store.

CI and CRM

Customer intelligence is a key component of effective customer relationship management (CRM), and when effectively implemented it is a rich source of insight into the behaviour and experience of a company's customer base.
As an example, some customers walk into a store and walk out without buying anything. Information about these customers/prospects (or their visits) may not exist in a traditional CRM system, as no sales are entered on the store cash register. Although no commercial transaction took place, knowing why customers leave the store (perhaps by asking them, or a store employee, to complete a survey) and using this data to make inferences about customer behaviour, is an example of CI.

trends in crm

Trends[edit]

Many CRM vendors offer subscription-based web tools (cloud computing) and software as a service (SaaS). Some CRM systems are equipped with mobile capabilities, making information accessible to remote sales staff.^{[citation needed]} Salesforce.com was the first company to provide enterprise applications through a web browser, and has maintained its leadership position.^[23] Traditional providers have recently moved into the cloud-based market via acquisitions of smaller providers: Oracle purchased RightNow in October 2011^[24] and SAP acquired SuccessFactors in December 2011.^[25]

The era of the "social customer"^[26] refers to the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, customer reviews in Amazon, etc.) by customers. CR philosophy and strategy has shifted to encompass social networks and user communities.

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. Empoweringsales managers was listed as one of the top 5 CRM trends in 2013.^[27]

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.^[28]

In 2001, Doug Laney developed the concept and coined the term 'Extended Relationship Management' (XRM).^[29] Laney defines XRM as extending CRM disciplines to secondary allies such as the government, press and industry consortia.

CRM futurist Dennison DeGregor describes a shift from 'push CRM' toward a 'customer transparency' (CT) model, due to the increased proliferation of channels, devices, and social media.^[30]

Capterra, Inc. ranked the Top CRM Software Solutions in 2013 based on total number of customers, total number of users and social presence.^[31]

Customer Relationship management Flow chart

Consumer relationship systems

Consumer relationship systems (CRS) are specialized customer relationship management (CRM) software applications that are used to handle a company's dealings with its customers.^[1]
Current CRS integrate the software with telephone and call recording systems as well as with corporate systems for input and reporting. Customers can provide input from the company's website directly into the CRS. These systems are popular because they can deliver the ‘voice of the consumer’ that contributes to product quality improvement and that ultimately increase corporate profits.^[1]
Consumer relationship systems that provide automated support as well as advanced systems may have artificial intelligence (AI) interfaces that can extract and analyze data collected, or handle basic questions and complaints.

Global and local GBS CRM business processes

Before introducing the Unified CRM Business Process Framework and drilling down into the details of the RMC solution, this section introduces the global and local GBS CRM business processes along with a few scenarios illustrating how the solution is being used and provides value.
The intent of this initiative is to establish a central portal on the internal IBM intranet for the GBS CRM business processes, including global process and local playbooks. The portal provides practitioners with the ability to access all process Websites, as illustrated in Figure 1. All intranet Websites are consistent across the globe in terms of structure, content, and look-and-feel, therefore providing a unified user experience.

The Global CRM Process captures the business process applicable worldwide and serves as the foundation for the local playbooks. Therefore, the Global CRM Process Website is accessed mostly by process owners and subject matter experts from both global and local CRM teams, as a reference and base for reflection and discussions around process improvement and deployment. In addition, the Global CRM Process Website can be leveraged for training purposes, as it represents a "light" version of the process free of locale-specific content, and is therefore suitable for beginners.
During engagements, however, practitioners go directly to their local playbook to quickly access the information they need in order to perform a given activity or task in the engagement cycle. Playbooks provide them with process guidance, business rules, and legal controls, which are either global or specific to their region or country. Practitioners have the flexibility to navigate their playbook Website directly from the IBM intranet, or to download a copy of the Website in order to have a local replica on their machine when working offline.
As an example, consider a consultant from IBM GBS New Zealand, sent to Spain on an assignment at a critical client site. This consultant may want to download the Spanish Playbook Website on her laptop from her home office before leaving for the airport, and surf the site during her flight to Madrid. Since the Spanish Playbook is similar to the Australia/New Zealand (ANZ) Playbook, she has no problem navigating the Website. While at the client site, the consultant accesses the Spanish Playbook as necessary to obtain specific process guidance and make sure her work complies with both global and Spanish business rules and regulations. For instance, at the end of the engagement, she can obtain some guidance on how to archive essential project records by looking at the "Archive Project Records" task. As illustrated in Figure 2, she can perform a side-by-side comparison between the Spanish and ANZ versions of the task. The comparison helps her quickly understand how archiving is done differently in Spain compared to New Zealand. In this case, archiving is a fully automated process in Spain, while in New Zealand some steps remain to be performed manually (detailed guidance on how to perform the ANZ steps is available by expanding the steps).