A History of CRM: From Customer-Centricity to Modern Solutions

CRM originated in early 1970s when the business units had a manifestation that it would be advisable to become ‘customer emphatic’ rather that ‘product emphatic’. Birth of CRM was because of this heedful perceptiveness.

The famous writer and management consultant Peter Drucker wrote; ‘The true business of every company is to make and keep customers’. Traditionally every transaction was on paper and dependent on goodwill which created hindrance in clutching customers. People used to work hard in entertaining customers by presenting new products with astonishing services; they were ready to work overtime for grasping more and more customers for increasing business. This too resulted in customer satisfaction and loyalty up to some extent, but at the end of the day there was no such bonding or relation between the two to carry on with future business smoothly.

Previously business was quite easy as it was mere a one-to-one dealing without any specific process. But with time, due to incoming complexities in communication, it found itself in troubled waters. Emerging of new strategies and technologies in global marketplace and a mammoth degree of competition in business, the approach needed to be changed to proactive rather than reactive. Origination of CRM turned out to be a piece of cake for all suppliers and customers due to its advantages. Customer relationship management came as a process that dealt with relationships with customers surpassing the whole business.

Originally customer relationship management was based on three major principles; shielding the current customers, fostering new customers and enhancing asset value of all the customers. With the advent of CRM which was integrated with high end software and technology, business perspectives were totally changed. A CRM system eventually emerged as consisting of company-full of information which is depicted sophistically to increase business profit and meliorate customer satisfaction and loyalty, on the same hand reduces business cost and investment.

The outgrowth in origin of CRM as a strategic approach is a result of some of the following important perspectives:

1. The belief that customers are the real assets and not just the people in the audience.
2. The maturation of one-to-one transaction advent.
3. Extensive use of software and technologies to maintain useful information and no manual labor.
4. The realization of the benefits of utilizing information proactively and not reactively.
5. The change of business view to relationship approach rather than transactional approach.
6. The approach of concentrating more on customer values rather than concentrating on how the product is delivered to the customer.
7. The approach of focusing on customer satisfaction and loyalty rather than focusing self satisfaction and profit.
8. The acceptance of the fact that using high end technologies and software the cost can radically be decreased without compromising on quality and service of products.
9. The increasing tendency to retain existing customers and trying to get more and more business out of them.
10. The realization that the traditional trends of marketing and selling are increasingly fading out in the current economic scenario.

These additive approaches helped a lot in building up consequently the modern CRM. Today we have well defined and sophisticated CRM systems into being which are always in process of improvement.