Electronic Commerce essays

Electronic Commerce essays Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an integrated approach aimed at improving the customer's total experience. This holistic endeavor involves understanding and optimizing customer interactions across all touchpoints such as Web sites, retail outlets, call centers, help desks and kiosks, across all company divisions or departments such as sales, marketing, accounting, customer service, and purchasing, and across all stages of company interaction such as presales, product/service and post-sales experiences. The goal of CRM is not only to obtain new customers and to increase the likelihood of sales, but also to reduce costs through developing more efficient business processes, improving customer relationships and increasing customer loyalty. The value of a unified customer view is tremendous. First, it makes it easier to customers to conduct business because all company representatives have access to customer data across all channels. The benefit for customers is that they do not have to provide duplicate data for multiple transactions, saving time and improving data quality. And, the employee interacting with the customer can more quickly respond to the customer request by having a better understanding of the customer's history. With a complete picture of customer interactions, companies can greatly improve their ability to market to customers by providing personalized Web and email content and tailored services that the customer will value. It's also easier to reward loyalty with affinity and retention programs designed specifically to meet the customer's needs. In the world of electronic commerce, self service is a must-have feature. This requires an integrated view of all customer data and transactions such as credit card data, shipping and billing addresses, order status and invoices. Besides being more loyal, customers may be willing to pay more for th...