CRM in General

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. In a world filled with buzzwords and acronyms, one might be tempted to think of CRM as just another management fad that only serves to make smart consultants rich and will soon be over and replaced by yet another buzzword.

Eventhough the CRM concept is certainly highly exposed and maybe even "hyped", there is still some very basic and sound business sense in the concept; off course you would want to make sure your customers are treated just as weel with you as they would with your competitor, and off course you would want to enhance the efficiency of your sales efforts.

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management as a term is almost self explanatory. Nevertheless you wil find numerous definitons and explanations if you ask around with suppliers, colleagues etc.

In this book we define CRM as "handling of all connections and activities between your company and persons in external companies with the purpose to achieve something"

"External companies" could off course be your customers, but it could also be prospects or any other type of company that is influencing your sales: Competitors, suppliers, partners, ....

"To achieve something" is off course to sell. But it could also be other things related to sales like, spreading a message, establish a contact, provoke a reaction etc.

What Do You Get from CRM?

Bottom line - the purpåose of CRM should be for you to sell more that you would have without CRM. Be it to existing or new customers. But in your daily processes CRM will give you improvements that in themselves hold value to you, your customers, your employees:

The list goes on, but hopefully you will agree that CRM is more than sending direct mails or printing a list of "who bought product A last year".

How is the CRM-data Structured?

In a CRM system you want to make sure that the data is corrects, and that it is kept safely and that it is "connected correctly". The last item is important and this is really what is special about a CRM system. A customer is not just a name and an address. In a CRM context a customer is also - the persons working there, the documents sent back and forth between your company and the customer, the activities conducted over time. The list continues, but the point is that you have to make sure that the connections remain intact.

To keep track of all the connections we use what is called a database. A database is a program running on a computer that makes sure that the data is stored correctly and can be fetched, shown, changed and stored again. The database has rules that ensures that everyone can have access to the data at the same time and that your business rules are enforced.

In the database we keep the data stored in a way the reflects the real world:  There may be many companies in the database and in each company there may be many contacts. Each contact is connected to a company, and therefore, changing the company's phone number will have effect for all the contacts in the company, sine the company phone number is onbly stored one place.

Figur 1: Struktur i data

In the figure you can see how data is divided into areas, depending on where the data belong to. In the Firma box (Firma = Company) you would find eg the name, phone number  and address of the company. In the Contact  box you would find data ot related to the company but to the secific contacts working in the company eg their names, phonenumber, email, and a field for which company they work.

Figur: Data i  tables

The data in the the different tables is linked together through internal "keys" to ensure that the right contacts show up in the right companies.

The tables above are only simplified examples. If you take a look at the ChannelCRM database you will find more than 100 tables. This is because of the many functions of the system but also because of a technique called database normalization, that ensures that it is easy to keep data valid, and up to date over time. As a user you will not need to know anything about the actual design of the database and how all the tables are constructed. The system will make sure that data is presented in the context you would expect. For instance: If you look at a window with details of a contact, you will also find the phone number of the company in which the contact is employed. Or - if you watch the documents journalized under a company you will find all documents that are journalized under contacts currently employed by the company.

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