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CRM - 10 Critical Factors
A Brief History of CRM
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a term coined in the 1990’s
to describe a system whereby every contact with a customer could be recorded
and analysed. Like many buzzwords, the term CRM now stand for pretty well
whatever each vendor of CRM systems wants it to, whether it is systems for sales
people (Sales Force Automation, Opportunity Management), for marketing people
(Marketing Automation, Campaign Management), Helpdesks (Customer Service
and Support), email and voice logging, and so on.
According to Wikipedia, an
online encyclopaedia,
“the generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers
through the introduction of reliable
processes and procedures for
interacting with those customers”.
Which is as good a definition as any.
CRM systems were the must-have
products at the height of the
Internet bubble in 2000/2001. There
followed a few years of
disillusionment as expensive systems
were late and then failed to deliver
the results to meet the raised
expectations of the users. The
Gartner Group, a US firm of analysts,
have a Hype Cycle Graph showing
the traditional pattern of a slow
start, followed by unjustified
euphoria, down to disillusionment
and back to a level of realisable sanity. Which is where we are today, at last.
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