Introduction

The essence of the information technology revolution and, in particular, the World Wide Web is the opportunity to build better relationships with customers than has been previously possible in the offline world. By combining the abilities to respond directly to customer requests and to provide the customer with a highly interactive, customized experience, companies have a greater ability today to establish, nurture, and sustain long-term customer relationships than ever before. The ultimate goal is to transform these relationships into greater profitability by increasing repeat purchase rates and reducing customer acquisition costs.

A major purpose I writes this is to provide a managerially useful, end-to-end view of the customer relationship management (CRM) process from a marketing perspective. The basic perspective taken is that of the customer, not the company. In other words, what do managers need to know about their customers and how is that information used to develop a complete CRM perspective? There is 7 basic components of CRM activities: 

1. A database of customer activity.

2. Analyses of the database.

3. Given the analyses, decisions about which customers to target.

4. Tools for targeting the customers

5. How to build relationships with the targeted customers.

6. Privacy issues.

7. Metrics for measuring the success of the CRM program.

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The means of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Defined as a software product, a data method, a sales strategy or data analyze. CRM totalize this definition and many others depending on each user necessity.

CRM means establish, to implement, to maintain and optimize of a long time relationship between the client and the company.

Another definition: CRM (customer relationship management) is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationship in an organized way.