Customer Relationship Management: A Strategic Imperative in the World of E-Business - Hardcover

In the face of increasing competition, mature markets, and the ever-demanding customer, it is easier than ever for customers to defect from your organization when they are just a click away from checking out the competition.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the key competitive strategy you need to stay focused on the needs of your customers and to integrate a customer-facing approach throughout your organization. CRM is an enterprise-wide approach to not only acquiring and deploying knowledge about your customers, but also to improving and automating the business processes that deliver value to your organization's customers, suppliers, and employees. In short, CRM is critical to your business success.

Sound complicated? It's not. Customer Relationship Management: A Strategic Imperative in the World of e-Business outlines what it takes to be effective in managing the customer relationship:

• What CRM is and how you can use it as a key competitive advantage
• Leading trends and best practices in CRM
• Successes and failures of organizations around the globe that have implemented CRM
• The 20 key steps in implementation of CRM
• The role of people, processes and technology to enable CRM
• How to define strategies for customers, channels and products, and infrastructure

• Explains how new technologies enable CRM as never before.
• Shows how back-office solutions create front-line efficiencies.
• Features examples and case studies of best-in-class companies that have integrated new web technologies with traditional channels to give them the right marketing mix (for interaction with customers rather than simply forcing self-service).
• Demonstrates how to implement and integrate several CRM technologies at once.
• Includes contributions from PricewaterhouseCoopers CRM consulting partners and senior professionals from around the globe.

But the hard fact is that, inadvertently, most CRM initiatives fail, crashing upon the rocks of duplicated effort, incompatible business solutions, wasted investment, and an increasingly inconsistent customer experience. But it does not need to happen this way.

CRM can indeed be a powerful strategy, but knowing what
it is and what it can do is simply not enough. That's where Performance Driven CRM comes in. It goes beyond what CRM is and what it can do for your organization, and offers a proven approach that shows clearly and quantifiably how to accomplish your CRM vision. But it doesn't stop there.

Performance-Driven CRM:
- Ensures that your CRM vision becomes reality and fosters
a cycle of continuous improvement.
- Delivers the skills needed to identify when customer
expectations change and how to respond to them.
- Describes the three critical performance programs
necessary to ensure enterprise-wide CRM.
- Provides a performance management program that
measures and monitors customer needs, organizational competencies, and quality service.
- Offers highly practical, hands-on, and proven tools for measuring and monitoring CRM initiatives: checklists, quizzes, work steps, planning templates, and more.
- Features case studies and best practices from organizations including FedEx, Marriott, DuPont, Honeywell, Nortel
Networks, Capital One, Radio Shack, and Sears.

Performance Driven CRM provides what has been missing up until now from the world of CRM: standards of performance and a balanced scorecard approach for your customer care initiatives. Performance Driven CRM keeps your CRM vision relevant, alive, and achievable, enabling you to drive successful and lasting CRM change.