Chapter - 2 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

2.1 REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Modern marketers are rediscovering the ancient mantras for success in corporate world and blending them with contemporary marketing practices. Long term survival and competitive advantage can only be attained by establishing an emotional bond with the customers. A shift is taking place from marketing to anonymous masses of customers to developing and managing relationships with more or less well known or at least some identified customers (Gronroos, 1994). This section shall provide general literature on CRM and its link with customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and business performance followed by literature on CRM and service quality in details. The gap model shall be introduced and literature on service guarantee, service recovery, and complaint management shall be provided. This would lead to the privacy issues related with CRM.

What is Customer Relationship Management? Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the core business strategy that integrates internal processes and functions, and external networks, to create and deliver value to targeted customers at a profit. It is grounded on high-quality customer data and enabled by IT (Buttle, 2004). CRM is a business strategy to identify, cultivate, and maintain long-term profitable customer relationships. It requires developing a method to select your most profitable customer relationships (or those with the most potential) and working to provide those customers with service quality that exceeds their expectations. (McDonald, 2002) An organizations survival depends largely on harmonious relationships with its stakeholders in the market. Customers provide the life-blood to the organization in terms of competitive advantage, revenue and profits. Managing relationships with customers is imperative for all types and size of service organizations. A sound base of satisfied customers allows the organization to move on the path of growth, enhance profitability, fight out competition and carve a niche in the market place. Bennett

(1996) described that CRM seeks to establish long term, committed, trusting and cooperative relationship with customers, characterized by openness, genuine concern for the delivery of high quality services, responsiveness to customer suggestions, fair dealings and willingness to sacrifice short term advantage for long term gains. Schneider and Bowen (1999) advocated that service business can retain customers and achieve profitability by building reciprocal relationships founded on safeguarding and affirming customer security, fairness and self esteem. It requires that companies view customers as people first and consumers second. Trust, commitment, ethical practices, fulfillment of promises, mutual exchange, emotional bonding,

personalization and customer orientation have been reported to be the key elements in the relationship building process (Levitt,1986; Gronroos, 1994; Morgan,1994; Gummesson,1994; Bejou et al,1998 ). CRM refers to all business activities directed towards initiating, establishing, maintaining, and developing successful long-term relational exchanges (Heide, 1994; Reinartz & Kumar, 2003). One of the results of CRM is the promotion of customer loyalty (Evans & Laskin, 1994), which is considered to be a relational phenomenon, (Chow & Holden, 1997; Jacoby & Kyner, 1973; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 1995; cited by Macintosh & Lockshin, 1997). The benefits of customer loyalty to a provider of either services or products are numerous, and thus organizations are eager to secure as significant a loyal customer base as possible (Gefen, 2002; Reinartz & Kumar, 2003; Rowley & Dawes, 2000). Recent developments in Internet technology have given the Internet a new role to facilitate the link between CRM and customer loyalty (Body and Limayem, 2004). It is common knowledge that a dissatisfied and unhappy customer will share his unfortunate experience more than a satisfied customer. It is also observed that a fraction of unhappy customers choose to complain while others simply switch their loyalty to others service providers. Loss of customer is loss of business along with the opportunity for business growth and profitability. Feedback collection from the customer is essential for the supplier to ascertain customer satisfaction and scope for improvisation (Sugandhi, 2002). The fundamental reason for companies aspiring to build relationships with customers is economic. For survival in the global market, focusing on the customer is becoming a key factor for companies big and small. Establishing and managing a good customer relationship is a strategic endeavor. Having a CRM software installed does not ensure

a successful customer relationship. For this to happen business processes and company culture have to be redesigned to focus on the customer. CRM software can be only a tool to implement a customer strategy. It is known that it takes up to five times more money to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to make a new purchase. Improving customer retention rates increases the size of the customer base. Thus, customer retention is essential.(Baumeister, unknown).

Components of CRM: 1. Contact an Account Management: Relevant data for customer profile is captured with the help of the software. Necessary information is captured from prospective customers. CRM system stores data in common customer database. The database integrates customer account information and presents it in desirable format to the company. The data is used for

sales, marketing, services and other applications. 2. Sales: Sales process management follows a customized sales methodology with specific sales policies and procedures. Sales activities include Product information, Product configuration, sales prospectus and sales quote generation. CRM also provide the history of customer account so that the sales call can be scheduled accordingly. 3. Marketing and fulfillment: CRM helps the professionals in product marketing, target marketing, relationship marketing and campaign management. By analyzing customer and business value of direct marketing can be estimated. CRM also helps in customer retention, behavior prediction, channel optimization, personalization. Customer response and requests can be quickly scheduled and hence sales contacts. 4. Customer Service and support: CRM system provides service representatives with adequate access to customer database. It also helps to create, assign and manage the service requests by customers. Calling format is designed to route customer calls to respective attendants as per the skills and authority to handle special cases. Help desk system is developed to help customer service representative to help customers who face problems with product or service to resolve it. Web-based Self Service means help customer to access personalized information at company website. 5. Retention and loyalty programs: The primary objective of CRM is to enhance and optimize customer retention and loyalty. CRM systems are also useful in determining most loyal and profitable customers and reward.

The essential link between Marketing, Sales and Customer Service: Too often, the three key functions that directly affect customers -Marketing, Sales and Customer Service operate independently of one another. This can create confusion and inconsistency in how you communicate and service your customers. For examples, marketing staff may come up with a price promotion. However, if that is not communicated to the sales team, the result could be incorrect billing, which may take time or resources from the customer to rectify and could create ill will and mistrust, making it seem like your company does not adhere to its word. Similarly, if a salesperson makes a sale and gives certain guarantees to a customer but those are not communicated to the customer service team or even to the other sales team members, then the customer may fees as if the company is not standing behind its assurance. This can be particularly problematic if there is employee turnover and poor communication between or even departments. This silo effect where information is between vertically in departments that may or may not communicate with each other- could actually damage your business. With comprehensive CRM system, however, customer communication is captured and housed in an accessible database, making the most current information available to anyone who needs it and has access to the system. By breaking through barriers

between various business functions and making communication transparent, your company can act in a more consistent and unified fashion with its customers, instilling a greater level of trust and strengthening customer relationships.

2.2 CRM SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY

Data sources that are used in CRM systems are customer service inquiries, customer surveys or sales force input such as purchase history, shipping history, account data, demographic data and Web sales data. Since a part of this information is obtained through enterprise resource planning systems, ERP databases must be integrated with some aspects of the CRM databases. Furthermore, CRM technology includes different aspects of information management, including integration with other enterprise-related systems and methods that convert data to usable information. CRM uses technology, strategic planning and personal marketing techniques to build a relationship that increases profit margins and productivity. It uses a business strategy that puts the customer at the core of a companys processes and practices. The implementation of CRM software should come along with a change of the companys mindset to become more customer oriented. It requires this customer focused business philosophy to support effective sales, marketing, and customer service and order fulfillment.

Some examples of CRM initiatives are A database that specifically tracks customer service issues; A web page that allows customers to check inventory availability, order status, and place orders; Data warehousing to build an information database to better understand your customers. Capturing visitor data including their name, e-mail, location, and purchasing preferences.

2.3 Defining CRM Objectives The business objectives for the implementation of CRM software are: Increased customer number and customer profitability; Increase in market share; Increased campaign response; Higher customer satisfaction ratings; Greater number of returning customers on the Web site. Simplified internal organization (shrink workflow, shortens cycle times, and eliminates non-productive information flow).

Furthermore, The Conference Board surveyed 96 global firms in order to analyze the CRM programs. 52 percent of the interviewed companies have implemented a CRM solution and, among others, the top three strategic motives were to increase customer retention and loyalty, to respond effectively to competitive pressure and to achieve a competitive advantage, and to differentiate competitively based on customer service superiority.

CRM Goals Differentiated by Departments Different departments have different objectives when adopting a CRM program. In the following, some examples of department-specific goals are presented: Customer Support Customer service objectives are: obtain basic information about customers and their complaints, customer satisfaction monitoring and faster complaints resolution in order to raise customer retention rates, to increase self-service efficiencies, and to mitigate the need for in-person assistance. Marketing The marketing department is interested in performing dynamic customer segmentation to begin more targeted customer communications and

campaigns, refined marketing campaigns, customer satisfaction by segment analysis, and tracking campaign responses. Sales The sales department objectives are to deploy sales force automation across regions, to track contact history, to streamline the sales process, and to qualify prospects based on past experience.

Field Service Field service implies the service or repair of the customers equipment on the customers premises. Field service engineers need to monitor customer complaints and repairs histories.

Customers According to a survey conducted by The Database Group concluded in November 2000, retailers with an implementation level of 15.1 percent one of the pioneering sectors for CRM and utilities companies with 17.9 percent implementation level lead the field for CRM strategy. Banks and insurers are heaving relatively poor CRM implementation levels, 7.3 percent, and 4.4 percent implementation level respectively, but are expected to catch up in the next years. However, their share on total customers is very high. About one third of the 100 companies surveyed have a CRM strategy, but again only one third of them achieved their plans. However, about a quarter executes important components of CRM. These components are, e.g., the ability to deal with customers consistently across multi communications channels (21 percent of companies) and the linkage of key customer information databases (28.8 percent of companies).

2.4 Purposes of Customer Relationship Management CRM, in its broadest sense, means managing all the interactions and business activities between a company and its customers. This includes, but is not limited to, improving customer service. A good CRM program will allow a business to acquire customers, service the customer, increase the

value of the customer to the company, retain good customers, and determine which customers can be retained or given a higher level of service. A good CRM program can improve customer service by facilitating communication in several ways: Increases the efficiency of customer interaction through all the communication channels available. Facilitates the collaboration between the client and the provider using the web, thus reducing the costs of customer relations management.

Provides product information, product use information and technical assistance on web sites that are accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Identifies how each individual customer defines quality, and then designs a service strategy for each customer, based on these individual requirements and expectations.

Provides a fast mechanism for managing and scheduling follow-up sales calls to assess post-purchase cognitive dissonance, repurchase probabilities, repurchase times, and repurchase frequencies.

Provides a mechanism to track all points of contact between a customer and the company, and does it in an integrated way, so that all the sources and the types of contacts are included, and all the users of the system see the same view of the customer (reduces confusion).

Helps to identify potential problems quickly, before they occur. Provides an user-friendly mechanism for registering customer complaints (complaints that are not registered with the company cannot be resolved, and are a major source of customer dissatisfaction).

Provides a fast mechanism for handling problems and complaints (complaints that are resolved quickly can increase customer satisfaction).

Provides a fast mechanism for correcting service deficiencies (correct the problem before other customers experience the same dissatisfaction).

Uses internet cookies to track customer interests and personalizes product offerings accordingly.

Provides a fast mechanism for managing and scheduling maintenance, repairs and on-going support (improves efficiency and effectiveness).

2.5 Challenges Despite the benefits, many companies are still not fully leveraging these tools and services to align marketing, sales, and service to best serve the enterprise. Tools and workflows can be complex to implement, especially for large enterprises. Previously these tools were generally limited to contact management: monitoring and recording interactions and communications. Software solutions then expanded to embrace deal tracking, territories, opportunities, and at the sales pipeline itself. Next came the advent of tools for other client-facing business functions, as described below. These technologies have been, and still are, offered as on-premises software that companies purchase and run on their own IT infrastructure. Often, implementations are fragmented; isolated initiatives by individual departments to address their own needs. Systems that start disunited usually stay that way: siloed thinking and decision processes frequently lead to separate and incompatible systems, and dysfunctional processes.

2.6 CRM PRACTICES IN INDIAN INDUSTRIES

These are turbulent times in the world of organizations and there is every indication that it will continue beyond the turn of the century and it into the new millennium. Behind this turbulence lies a series of frequently cited environmental factors: Technological advances, Deregulation of markets etc. that has created intensified global competition. These forces have changed and continued to change the dynamics of marketplace but the only tool that perceived to make sense, being the most potent and effective to compete globally in this emerging marketing environment is Customer Relationship Management. The world is becoming a buyers market, where increasing discerning customers are freer than ever to select their global market place. Highly empowered and informed customers have made Customer Relationship Management (CRM) a most important area to concentrate upon by the marketers.

Studies have proved the worth of CRM in turning the customer service into customer sales. CRM works on the theme of retaining existing customers i.e., most businesses get customers but successful businesses keep them. Keeping customers happy is not just good public relations; its an essential part of sound business strategy.

Relationship Management: Changing paradigms in Marketing Relationship management is emerging as the core marketing activity for businesses operating in fiercely competitive environments. On average, businesses spend six times more to acquire customers than they do to keep them. Therefore, many firms are paying more attention to their relationships with existing customers to retain them and increase their share of customers purchases. Banks have relationship managers for select customers, airlines have frequent flyer programs to reward loyal customers, credit cards offer redeemable bonus points for increased card usage, telecom service operators provide customized services to their heavy users, and hotels have personalized services for their regular guests.

There is a radical shift from conventional to relationship marketing which can be attributed to a number of reasons viz: competitive pressures, shrinking product life cycles, brand proliferations, frequent new product introductions, changing customer profile, active informed and cautious customer, fickle brand loyalties and rapid customer turnover, industry maturity and recessionary pressures, harsh marketing environment etc. these factors clearly reveal that marketers cannot totally depend on new customers to take the place of lost customers. They are required to focus on developing, keeping and improving current customers rather on acquiring new customers as customers prefer to have an ongoing relationship with one organization that to switch continually in their search for value. Relationship management is a philosophy of doing business in a highly competitive market with a strategic orientation that focuses on keeping and improving relationship with the existing key customers to develop life time customers and enhance lifetime value of the customers

2.7 CRM A snapshot view The development of information superhighway and opening up of the digital markets has made marketing efforts more information oriented, service oriented and relationship oriented. It has enabled the marketers to provide customized product or service offerings and develop value laden long lasting relationships with the customers. As a philosophy Customer Relationship Management is the most significant development in the evolution of marketing since the 1960s. It enables the marketing, sales and service functions to be truly integrated, company priorities to be clarified and resources to be more planned and cost-effectively deployed. CRM, conceptually, is an enterprise-wide initiative that belongs in all areas of an organisation. Customer-Driven business management should be embraced by all functions at all levels. The full implications of customer relationship management could mean a dramatic shift in emphasis by the supplier from organisation by function to an organisation aligned to specific customers or groups of customers, which, in

turn, means changes in the structure of the business, the responsibilities and the relative status of the individual in the business and maybe even the product itself.

Averon Infotech Pvt. Ltd. has identified five key aspects that an organisation will have to change in order to truly support and foster CRM initiatives. The stages of transformation are shown from left to right from Product to customer. It is a matter of an organisation shifting its emphasis over time. figure:

Transforming the business focus of an organization essentially means getting the organization to buy into the customer-focused paradigm. The business focus may shift from "How can we increase the sales of our products" to "What do our customers need, and how can we meet those needs?" Changing the organizational structure of a company goes hand in hand with the change in business focus. The transformation to a customer-focused organization should lead to literally organizing around your customers assigning customer segment managers responsibility for the acquisition, retention and growth of different segments of customers.

Transforming the business metrics should be a byproduct of the changes previously noted. In this case, the shift is from a single focus on product performance, and/or promotion performance, or decentralized views of these metrics to a focus on customer lifetime value and loyalty. Changing the marketing focus or customer interactions within your organization from mass to interactive dialogue is also essential. If you change your business focus and organize around your customers, you have to be able to implement to provide differential customer experiences through marketing, sales and service. Finally, there is an essential technology

transformation. CRM technology must support and enable meaningful customer dialogue at all points of contact. It is important to keep in mind that all five of these areas need to change in order to effectively support CRM. Four out of five or some other fractional level of participation will not work, as in this case you are only as strong as your weakest link. CRM is, therefore, a business concept that has broad- reaching impact across your organization. In order to move forward, we recommend that you first identify where your organization stands in each of these five areas and then develop a phased plan for change. CRM in a nutshell can be described as a discipline as well as a set of discrete software and technologies which focuses on automating and improving the business processes associated with managing customer relationship in the area of sales, marketing, customer service and support.

CRM enables co-ordination of multiple business channels of communication with the customer such as, face-to-face, the telephony, the web etc. This helps organisations accommodate their customers preferred choices of interactions.

2.8 Types/variations Sales force automation Sales force automation (SFA) involves using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase. This allows sales representatives to pursue more clients in a shorter amount of time than would otherwise be possible. At the heart of SFA is a contact management system for tracking and recording every stage in the sales process for each prospective client, from initial contact to final disposition. Many SFA applications also include insights into opportunities, territories, sales forecasts and workflow automation, quote generation, and product knowledge. Modules for Web 2.0 e-commerce and pricing are new, emerging interests in SFA.

Marketing CRM systems for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, telephone and direct mail. Metrics monitored include clicks, responses, leads, deals, and revenue. Alternatively, Prospect Relationship Management (PRM) solutions offer to track customer behaviour and nurture them from first contact to sale, often cutting out the active sales process altogether. In a web-focused marketing CRM solution, organizations create and track specific web activities that help develop the client relationship. These activities may include such activities as free downloads, online video content, and online web presentations.

Customer service and support Recognizing that service is an important factor in attracting and retaining customers, organizations are increasingly turning to technology to help them improve their clients experience while aiming to increase efficiency and minimize costs. Even so, a

2009 study revealed that only 39% of corporate executives believe their employees have the right tools and authority to solve client problems.

Appointment Creating and scheduling appointments with customers is a central activity of most customer oriented businesses. Sales, customer support, and service personnel regularly spend a portion of their time getting in touch with customers and prospects through a variety of means to agree on a time and place for meeting for a sales conversation or to deliver customer service. Appointment CRM is a relatively new CRM platform category in which an automated system is used to offer a suite of suitable appointment times to a customer via e-mail or through a web site. An automated process is used to schedule and confirm the appointment, and place it on the appropriate person's calendar. Appointment CRM systems can be an origination point for a sales lead and are generally integrated with sales and marketing CRM systems to capture and store the interaction.

Analytics Relevant analytics capabilities are often interwoven into applications for sales, marketing, and service. These features can be complemented and augmented with links to separate, purpose-built applications for analytics and business intelligence. Sales analytics let companies monitor and understand client actions and preferences, through sales forecasting and data quality. Marketing applications generally come with predictive analytics to improve segmentation and targeting, and features for measuring the effectiveness of online, offline, and search marketing campaigns. Web analytics have evolved significantly from their starting point of merely tracking mouse clicks on Web sites. By evaluating buy signals, marketers can see which prospects are most likely to transact and also identify those who are bogged down in a sales process and need assistance. Marketing

and finance personnel also use analytics to assess the value of multi-faceted programs as a whole. These types of analytics are increasing in popularity as companies demand greater visibility into the performance of call centers and other service and support channels, in order to correct problems before they affect satisfaction levels. Support-focused applications typically include dashboards similar to those for sales, plus capabilities to measure and analyze response times, service quality, agent performance, and the frequency of various issues.

Integrated/Collaborative Departments within enterprises especially large enterprises tend to function with little collaboration.More recently, the development and adoption of these tools and services have fostered greater fluidity and cooperation among sales, service, and marketing. This finds expression in the concept of collaborative systems that use technology to build bridges between departments. For example, feedback from a technical support center can enlighten marketers about specific services and product features clients are asking for. Reps, in their turn, want to be able to pursue these opportunities without the burden of re-entering records and contact data into a separate SFA system.

Small business For small business, basic client service can be accomplished by a contact manager system: an integrated solution that lets organizations and individuals efficiently track and record interactions, including emails, documents, jobs, faxes, scheduling, and more. These tools usually focus on accounts rather than on individual contacts. They also generally include opportunity insight for tracking sales pipelines plus added functionality for marketing and service. As with larger enterprises, small businesses are finding value in online solutions, especially for mobile and telecommuting workers.

Social media Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are amplifying the voice of people in the marketplace and are having profound and far-reaching effects on the ways in which people buy. Customers can now research companies online and then ask for recommendations through social media channels, making their buying decision without contacting the company. People also use social media to share opinions and experiences on companies, products and services. As social media is not as widely moderated or censored as mainstream media, individuals can say anything they want about a company or brand, positive or negative. Increasingly, companies are looking to gain access to these conversations and take part in the dialogue. More than a few systems are now integrating to social networking sites. Social media promoters cite a number of business advantages, such as using online communities as a source of high-quality leads and a vehicle for crowd sourcing solutions to clientsupport problems. Companies can also leverage client stated habits and preferences to "hyper-target" their sales and marketing communications. Some analysts take the view that business-to-business marketers should proceed cautiously when weaving social media into their business processes. These observers recommend careful market research to determine if and where the phenomenon can provide measurable benefits for client interactions, sales and support. It is stated that people feel their interactions are peer-to-peer between them and their contacts, and resent company involvement, sometimes responding with negatives about that company.

Non-profit and membership-based Systems for non-profit and membership-based organizations help track constituents and their involvement in the organization. Capabilities typically include tracking the

following: fund-raising, demographics, membership levels, membership directories, volunteering and communications with individuals. Many include tools for identifying potential donors based on previous donations and participation. In light of the growth of social networking tools, there may be some overlap between social/community driven tools and non-profit/membership tools.

Strategy For larger-scale enterprises, a complete and detailed plan is required to obtain the funding, resources, and company-wide support that can make the initiative of choosing and implementing a system successfully. Benefits must be defined, risks assessed, and cost quantified in three general areas: Processes: Though these systems have many technological components, business processes lie at its core. It can be seen as a more client-centric way of doing business, enabled by technology that consolidates and intelligently distributes pertinent information about clients, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness, and market trends. Therefore, a company must analyze its business workflows and processes before choosing a technology platform; some will likely need re-engineering to better serve the overall goal of winning and satisfying clients. Moreover, planners need to determine the types of client information that are most relevant, and how best to employ them. People: For an initiative to be effective, an organization must convince its staff that the new technology and workflows will benefit employees as well as clients. Senior executives need to be strong and visible advocates who can clearly state and support the case for change. Collaboration, teamwork, and two-way communication should be encouraged across hierarchical boundaries, especially with respect to process improvement. Technology: In evaluating technology, key factors include alignment with the companys business process strategy and goals, including the ability to deliver the right data to the right employees and sufficient ease of adoption and use. Platform selection is best undertaken by a carefully chosen group of executives who understand

the business processes to be automated as well as the software issues. Depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, choosing an application can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more.

2.9 Implementation Increases in revenue, higher rates of client satisfaction, and significant savings in operating costs are some of the benefits to an enterprise. Proponents emphasize that technology should be implemented only in the context of careful strategic and operational planning. Implementations almost invariably fall short when one or more facets of this prescription are ignored: Poor planning: Initiatives can easily fail when efforts are limited to choosing and deploying software, without an accompanying rationale, context, and support for the workforce. In other instances, enterprises simply automate flawed client-facing processes rather than redesign them according to best practices.

Poor integration: For many companies, integrations are piecemeal initiatives that address a glaring need: improving a particular client-facing process or two or automating a favored sales or client support channel. Such point solutions offer little or no integration or alignment with a companys overall strategy. They offer a less than complete client view and often lead to unsatisfactory user experiences.

Toward a solution: overcoming siloed thinking. Experts advise organizations to recognize the immense value of integrating their client-facing operations. In this view, internally-focused, department-centric views should be discarded in favor of reorienting processes toward information-sharing across marketing, sales, and service. For example, sales representatives need to know about current issues and relevant marketing promotions before attempting to cross-sell to a specific client. Marketing staff should be able to leverage client information from sales and service to better target campaigns and offers. And support agents require quick and complete access to a clients sales and service history.

2.10 Adoption issues Historically, the landscape is littered with instances of low adoption rates. In 2003, a Gartner report estimated that more than $1 billion had been spent on software that was not being used. More recent research indicates that the problem, while perhaps less severe, is a long way from being solved. According to CSO Insights, less than 40 percent of 1,275 participating companies had end-user adoption rates above 90 percent. In a 2007 survey from the U.K., four-fifths of senior executives reported that their biggest challenge is getting their staff to use the systems they had installed. Further, 43 percent of respondents said they use less than half the functionality of their existing system; 72 percent indicated they would trade functionality for ease of use; 51 percent cited data synchronization as a major issue; and 67 percent said that finding time to evaluate systems was a major problem. With expenditures expected to exceed $11 billion in 2010, enterprises need to address and overcome persistent adoption challenges. Specialists offer these recommendations for boosting adoptions rates and coaxing users to blend these tools into their daily workflow: Choose a system that is easy to use: not all solutions are created equal; some vendors offer applications that are more user-friendly a factor that should be as important to the decision as is functionality.

Choose appropriate capabilities: employees need to know that the time they invest in learning and in using the new system will not be wasted, indeed that it will yield personal advantages; otherwise, they will ignore or circumvent the system.

Provide training: changing the way people work is no small task; to be successful, some familiarization training and help-desk support are usually required, even with todays more usable systems.

Lead by example: upper management must use the new application themselves, thereby showing employees that the top leaders fully support the application or else it will skew the ultimate course of the initiative toward failure, by risking a greatly reduced rate of adoption by employees.

Privacy and data security system One of the primary functions of these tools is to collect information about clients, thus a company must consider the desire for privacy and data security, as well as the legislative and cultural norms. Some clients prefer assurances that their data will not be shared with third parties without their prior consent and that safeguards are in place to prevent illegal access by third parties.

2.11 MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF CRM

As mentioned, one of the most difficult parts of a CRM project is defining success parameters. Even if the success factors are different, in the end many companies choose the ROI (Return on Investment) as the only success factor, although this choice is controversial. Sometimes, CRM systems measure the ROI simply as the incremental revenue or margin return from implementing a CRM technology. This has only limited applicability, as it doesnt give sufficient insight to make ongoing decisions that improve the customer relationship. It considers the problem only from the business point of view, and sees the customer only as a source of revenue, while CRM ROI should integrate both the margin and the customer satisfaction. A study conducted by the researchers at the University of Dayton illustrates four major measurements for CRM success: - The CRM's ability to impact corporate strategy (according to 25 percent of respondents); - Successful technological integration (according to 23 percent of respondents); - Enhanced strategic partnerships (according to 20 percent of respondents); - Assimilation of CRM-related technologies (according to 18 percent of respondents). Another financial success indicator is the customer lifetime value (CLV). It allows companies to measure beyond one time period and beyond one customer, and combines both the discounted cash flow, the activity costs and the probabilities for customer retention to help understand the impact of different CRM scenarios. The profitability outcomes of the most likely scenarios that can be implemented must be compared to find the best path to increase total profitability.

2.12 STEPS INVOLVED IN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION THROUGH SERVICE

Learn how to make a strong, positive impact on customers, especially when there is a problem. Analyze the factors that affect the customers relationship with organization and their perceptions of how organization handle their business. Learn how to build customer satisfaction through a service communication process that focuses on not only solving the problem but also reinforcing a positive long-term relationship. Following are some of the steps Seeing problems from the customers perspective Managing customers moments of truth Communicating effectively through better listening Analyzing how customer perceptions are formed Managing anger and other service behaviors Dealing with long-term consequences of service breakdowns Negotiating solutions Generating an action plan for improved on-the-job effectiveness

Customer Relation-Profile When mapping the quality of a customer relationship, we use the following model where the head symbolize the competencies we exchange. The Heart symbolizes our communication and co-operation, and the Legs concern the responsibility and professionalism with which we implement or deliver the competencies we have agreed upon.

2.13 MODEL FOR CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP

2.14 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

To analyze the customer relationship management of Averon Infotech Pvt. Ltd., Pune and to get feedback of training programs of Manpower Consultant. To identify the CRM activities of the Averon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.. To study the effectiveness of services rendered by Averon Infotech Pvt. Ltd.. To give suggestive measures to bring about improvement in Customer Relationship Management.