Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM): A Strategy for Customer Engagement

Customer Relationship Management (Crm): An Overview

CRM term refers to building a customer-oriented culture where IT applications are utilized to enhance profitability and retain customers, so basically there are three main elements of any CRM strategy/initiative which are: people, process, and technology. CRM is a strategy where the customer is the king; it is all about a strategy where the main focus is the customer (Rababah, Mohd, & Ibrahim, 2011).

The literature shows that customer relationship management systems can be classified into three main categories: analytical, operational, and collaborative CRM (Khasawneh & Alazzam, 2014; Rababah, Mohd, & Ibrahim, 2011; Xiong et al., 2011; Khodakarami & Chan,2011; Oghojafor, Aduloju & Olowokudejo, 2011; Jirehbandei & Pour, 2011;Troggler, 2009; Rollins & Halinen, 2005; Gebert et al., 2003).

• 1.

  Analytical CRM: It is a great tool for building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers; it analyzes customer data to generate information about customer behavior, purchase patterns and market segmentation by incorporating various tools and techniques such as data mining. Analytical CRM is also called back office CRM system.

• 2.

  Operational CRM: The main goal of operational CRM is to improve efficiency and productivity by automating traditional CRM processes and operations. These operations include data collection, transactions processing, and workflow control. It is also called front office CRM system.

• 3.

  Collaborative CRM: Another category of CRM which works at the operational level and focused on integrating and managing various communication channels that customers can use to interact with organizations. These channels include email, video and web conferencing applications, websites pages, and many others. It is a motivator for interactive learning relationship between the companies and their customers.