What is customer relationship management (CRM)? How are firms integrating this information into their marketing and general business practices? Provide an example of CRM in a firm.

The question of how best to analyze and use individual customer data presents special problems. In the current big data era, most companies are awash in information about their customers and the marketplace. Still, smart companies capture information at every possible ­customer touch point. These touch points include customer purchases, sales force contacts, service and support calls, web and social media site visits, satisfaction surveys, credit and payment interactions, market research studies—every contact between a customer and a company.

Unfortunately, this information is usually scattered widely across the organization or buried deep in separate company databases. To overcome such problems, many companies are now turning to customer relationship management (CRM)to manage detailed information about individual customers and carefully manage customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty.

Customer relationship ­management (CRM)

Managing detailed information about individual customers and carefully managing customer touch points to maximize customer loyalty.

CRM consists of sophisticated software and analysis tools from companies such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAS that integrate customer and marketplace information from all sources, analyze it, and apply the results to build stronger customer relationships. CRM integrates everything that a company’s sales, service, and marketing teams know about individual customers, providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship. For example, MetLife recently developed a CRM system that it calls “The MetLife Wall”:20

One of the biggest customer service challenges for MetLife’s sales and service reps used to be quickly finding and getting to customer information—different records, transactions, and interactions stored in dozens of different company data locations and formats. The MetLife Wall solves that problem. The Wall uses a Facebook-like interface to serve up a consolidated view of each MetLife customer’s service experience. The innovative CRM system draws customer data from 70 different MetLife systems containing 45 million customer agreements and 140 million transactions. It puts all of a given customer’s information and related links into a single record on a single screen, updated in near real time. Now, thanks to The MetLife Wall—with only a single click instead of the 40 clicks it used to take—sales and service reps can see a complete view of a given customer’s various policies, transactions, and claims filed and paid along with a history of all the interactions the customer has had with MetLife across the company’s many touch points, all on a simple timeline. The Wall has given a big boost to MetLife’s customer service and cross-selling efforts. According to a MetLife marketing executive, it’s also had “a huge impact on customer satisfaction.”

By using CRM to understand customers better, companies can provide higher levels of customer service and develop deeper customer relationships. They can use CRM to pinpoint high-value customers, target them more effectively, cross-sell the company’s products, and create offers tailored to specific customer requirements.