The concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

The CRM is becoming increasingly popular in the last ten years.

Just consider the following founding: (Kalakota et al.)

- it costs six times more to sell to a new customer, than to sell to an existing one;

- a typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about his or her experience;

- a company can boost its profits 85% by increasing its annual customer retention by only 5%;

- the odds of selling a product to a new customer are 15%, whereas the odds of selling a product to an existing customer are 50%;

- 70% of complaining customers will do business with company again if it fixes quickly the service problem;

These are more than enough reasons for a company to consider turning to CRM when the customer is the focus of their strategy.

CRM with the help of information technology creates cross-functional enterprise system, able to integrate and even automate - many processes that are directly connected with the companys customers. Usually these processes are in sales, marketing and product services areas in the operations that are traditionally close to the customers. Moreover, the CRM systems task is to connect those processes with the rest of the company business activities.

Many software companies- Siebel and Oracle, to mention two-have sensed the attractiveness of a concept that allows business processes to be aligned with customer