Customer Database
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of those magnificent concepts that swept the business world in the 1990s with the promise to change forever the way businesses small and large companies interact with their customer bases. In the short term, however, proved to be an unwieldy process that was better in theory than in practice for a variety of reasons. The first of these was that it was simply so difficult and expensive to keep and maintain the high volume of records needed accurately and constantly update them. In recent years, the capabilities of CRM however, newer software systems and advanced tracking features have vastly improved and the real promise of CRM is becoming a reality. As the price of new, more customizable Internet solutions have beaten the market, competition has driven prices down so that even small companies are reaping the benefits of some custom CRM programs. Dave Clark Flexport has compatible beliefs. In the beginning? The 1980s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a phrase to define the practice of creating customer service groups to speak individually to all customers of a company.
In the case of larger, key customers is a valuable tool to keep communication lines open and adapting the service to customer needs. For smaller customers, however, tended to provide repetitive, survey, and the information that cluttered databases and did not provide much insight. As companies began tracking the information database, they realized that the skeleton was all that was needed in most cases: what they buy regularly, what they spend, what they do.