School of PE Blog

Introduction to Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Once businesses start growing, managers need to store an increasing amount of customer data, and it can become very difficult to keep track of every client's information. By implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) approach, an organization can easily sort out the clients' data. To maintain the records of customer data, categorization is essential. The categorization of customer data is based on inactive and active customers, suppliers, and partners. When using spreadsheets, it is difficult to for everyone in the organization to track all customer interactions. CRM makes it easy to store this kind of data and also manages all aspects of sales efficiently by providing full visibility into the sales process. Engineering economics is a major topic for the financial analysis of the organization, and it directly depends on customer relationship management. Computational tools and engineering economics concepts are reviewed in FE exam review courses.

The Process of CRM in An Organization

CRM is a method of managing the organization's relations with active and potential customers. CRM improves business relationships with customers by analyzing data involving customers' histories with a company. CRM mainly focuses on customer retention in order to drive sales growth. The primary goal of CRM is to provide integration and automation of sales, marketing, and customer support. CRM systems have a control panel that gives an overall view of the these functions on a particular page for each customer. The control panel provides customer information, existing sales strategies, future sales strategies, and a summary of all of the relationships between the customer and the company. The CRM process has three steps: sales automation, service automation, and marketing automation.

Sales automation implements automatic tracking of a client's history for repeated sales, marketing, calls, and retail channels. Marketing automation focuses the overall marketing efforts to make them more effective and better organized. The service automation system focuses on direct customer service technology. Through service automation, customers are maintained through multiple networks such as phone calls, emails, and social media advertising. Electrical and computer engineers should be familiar with the process and functionality of customer relationship management; if they are not, fundamentals of engineering exam review courses will help to refresh and recap the programming equations for the FE exam.

Benefits of Implementing CRM in An Organization

CRM tools can systematically manage repeated tasks such as sending out marketing emails at certain times to customers and posting marketing information on social media. Customer satisfaction is an important implication for the economic performance of companies because it has the ability to increase customer allegiance and usage behavior and reduce customer complaints. CRM helps to enhance customer supporting services by sending personalized messages in a timely manner to better serve customers and to better understand their needs.