Emerging Trends In Customer Relationship Management

The biggest management challenge in the new millennium of liberalisation and globalization for a business is to serve and maintain good relations with the king-the customer. In the past, producers took their customers for granted because at that time customers were not demanding nor had many alternative sources of supply or suppliers. Since he was a passive customer, the producer dictated terms and had little customer commitment. But today there is a radical transformation. The changing business environment is characterised by economic liberalisation, increasing competition, high consumer choice, enlightened and demanding customer, more emphasis on quality and value of purchase.

All these changes have made today's producer shift from traditional marketing to modern marketing. Modern marketing calls for more than developing a product, pricing it, promoting it and making it accessible to target customers. It demands building trust, a binding force and value added relationship with the customers to win their hearts. The new age marketing aims at winning customers for ever, where companies greet the customers, create products to suit their needs, work hard to develop life time customers through the principles of customer delight, approval and enthusiasm.

WHAT IS CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT ( CRM )

The process of developing a cooperative and collaborative relationship between the buyers and sellers is called customer relationship management shortly called CRM.

CRM aims at focusing all the organizational activities towards creating and maintaining a customer. CRM is a new technique in marketing where the marketer tries to develop long term collaborative relationship with customers to develop them as life time customers. CRM aims to make the customer climb up the ladder of loyalty.

CUSTOMER FOCUS IN BANKING SERVICES

As the intense competition becomes a way of doing business, it is the customer who calls the shot in deciding the nature of products and services offered in the market. The customers are becoming demanding, dominant and selective. In fact the perceptions and the expectations of the customers have undergone a sea change, with the availability of banking services to the customers at their door steps through the help of technology.

Marketing of customer services aims at two important goals: prosperity to the bank and satisfied customers. Banks offer tangible services like loan schemes, interest rates and kinds of account and the intangible services like behavior and efficiency of staff, speed of transactions and the ambience. The banks may need to include customer oriented approach or customer focus in their five areas of businesses such as Cash accessibility, asset security, money transfer, deferred payment and financial advices.

There are four strategies available to customer relations' managers:

• To win back or save customers

• To attract new and potential customers

• To create loyalty among existing customers and

• To up sell or offer cross services.

The future of banking business very much depends upon the ability of the banks to develop close relationship with the customers. In order to develop close relationship with the customers the banking industry has to focus on the technology oriented innovations that offer convenience to the customers. Today customers are offered ATM services, access to internet banking and phone banking facilities and credit cards. These have elevated banking beyond the barriers of time and space.