Customer Relationship Management (CRM) allows an organization:
•    To understand customer behaviour and purchasing patterns
•    Build trust and engage with Customers ie build relationship with customers
•    Enhance the customer relationship and experience through recommendation and localization of products and services

Fortunately, technology advances and the internet has created many new tools to support customer relationship management.

For some businesses, Customer Relationship Management CRM is simply collecting contact details such as email addresses and sending out periodical communications or newsletters. But Customer relationship management should be much more than that. 

For example,when building a website it should be developed with building customer relationship in mind.  Whether a customer is surfing through the website or making contact with the organization – such information could and should be tracked, stored in a database and generated to provide critical information from the customer list to individual references, transaction history etc etc.

You can then utilise this information to personalize communication to make it subscriber specific which will enable you to promote new products, sell specific items/product lines or just ensure targeted messages.

How to get started with CRM?
 Think about the following two questions to get you started:

1.    Do you value your relationship with your customers? ie Is there value to know more about your customers?
2.    Are there benefits in improving your relationship with your customers?

If the answer is yes to the above, you will need investment in Customer Relationship Management and it should be prioritized.

5 steps to creating a winning Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy:
1.    Create the right product/services
2.    Get to know your customers
3.    Create a dialogue with your customers
4.    Create tools to win your customer
5.    Track customer behaviour