Digital business and new technologies

Running Head: MANAGEMENT 0
s
DIGITAL BUSINESS AND
NEW TECHNOLOGIES

MANAGEMENT 1
Customer Relationship Management
With the evolution of digital world, there is no doubt that technology is shaping the future in
terms of making significant impact on business firms and marketing. Moreover, there are
various sorts of technologies that are either being used by the companies or as customers and
it is not wrong to say that initially, most of the business firms are entirely relies upon its
labour force. With rise of technology, no businesses want to lag behind and attain to gain
competitive edge in their respective industry. Most of the large scale business firms have
already started implementing technology in their management structures and practices as they
believe that technology and innovation are key drivers of competitive advantage in today’s
knowledge economy.
In references to the topics from the lecturer side, the topic that is selected as customer
relationship management (CRM) and Athanasoulias and Chountalas (2017) defined CRM as
a system that improves a business capability to nurture and cultivate customer relationships
by offering a unified approach in managing customer associated information while also
streamlining various processes. This topic deemed to be important as it is related with the one
of the most important stakeholders of the company i.e. customers and all the business or
corporate activities are directed towards the successful satisfaction of customers only and at
this core, CRM is all concern of such activities, technologies and strategies that businesses
used to manage their interactions with their existing and potential customers. In simple
words, CRM helps companies in developing a relationship with their customers that in turn,
creates loyalty and customer retention resulting in increased profit for the business in the long
period of time.
In relation with development and evolution of customer relationship management, it was
started back in the 1950s, as the business grew, memory gave away to pen, paper and pad for
gathering and storing relevant customer information. Following to this, database marketing
became a trend in the 1980s, which allows organisations to use of statistics to collect and
analyse the data so as to develop customized communication for retaining and attracting
customers (Giannakis-Bompolis and Boutsouki, 2014). Furthermore, CRM gained credibility
and boom in software development marketing in the early 90s with introduction of sales force
automation for organisation. CRM products also began to comprise different functions of
organisations such as marketing, shipping and enterprise resource planning and together with

MANAGEMENT 2
it, online CRM became a reality. With passage of time, there is an integration of CRM with
business intelligence services and communication technologies and services. CRM is now
expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025 (talisma.com, 2018) and the
future of this technology holds a lot of promises as cloud, IoT, Big Data and Machine
learning driving the growth story of various enterprises.
According to Soltani and Navimipour (2016), customer relationship management is also a
strategy that companies exploit to manage and handle interactions with the customers and
potential customers and benefit enterprise to streamlines its processes, increase sales,
improve customer service and raises profitability. Hence, CRM can be used either as
technology, strategy or process so as to organisation necessary information to present a
complete record of business and individuals aiding management to understand the
relationship over time. CRM can be used and implemented in arrays of methods such as
social media, websites, chat, mail, and various marketing materials can all be synchronised
into a CRM solution.
In terms of technological platforms and software’s, Customer Relationship Management
systems include data warehouse technology, CRM systems for eCommerce, CRM software
such as software as a service (SaaS), all delivered via the internet with a typical recurring
subscription fee to the respective vendor. Each technological innovation is suited to the
different types of organisation with unique processes, however, similar functionalities (Souri,
Asghari and Rezaei, 2017). The CRM will do the work of centralizing information while
applying its functionalities in all types of organisations from SME having small databases
running well marketing campaigns to the enterprises of more than 500 employees’ with
multifaceted functionalities and users. Furthermore, CRM applications can be used and
embraced over any sort of industry whether manufacturing, insurance, finance or technology
as every industry and firms have a significant level of client base from which they seek to
gain reliable data and insights to serve them a better service of product.
There are many ways CRM can be used as the business tool and help in its positive growth
and development by connecting the customers and improves business performance. For
instance, with CRM tools and software’s, a business firm can discover the right customers
and in today’s competitive business environment, 79% of all marketing leads are never
converted to sales in the absence of CRM system (salesforce.com, 2020). Both marketing and
sales will have an inclusive view of leads and prospects and it will help them in creating and