The Crm Process In A Organisation

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

There are numerous of knowledge management concept has been defined by various researchers and practitioners and there is no limitation to defined it. The concept of knowledge management in today’s globalisation world has brought to widen aspect, where it applies based on the circumstances of certain place, time as well as space.

According to Awad and Ghaziri (2001) –"Knowledge management concept is a newly emerging, interdisciplinary business model that has knowledge within the framework of an organisation as its focus". It is rooted in many disciplines, including business, economics, and information management. It is the ultimate competitive advantage for today’s firm. Knowledge management involves people, technology, and processes in overlapping parts (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1: Overlapping Human, Organisational and technological factors of KM.

Knowledge management know as a part of corporate culture, which supports the active exchange of information, knowledge and experiences between employees and department and as a company oriented method. Knowledge management view to be important in processes such as understanding markets and customers, development of products and services and management of improvements and change. Companies start with knowledge management in those fields that they considered as their core competencies.

Knowledge management is the process of capturing and making use of a firm’s collective expertise anywhere in the business on paper, in documents, in databases and it call explicit knowledge or in people’s heads and it call tactic knowledge.

Tacit knowledge is understood by person feelings, thoughts and performance; so it cannot be explain in words and directly and it is usually percept as unstructured knowledge, but explicit knowledge can be uttered directly and verbally. It is usually identify as structured knowledge.

"Relationship marketing is a long term strategy to build relationships with individual customers". Relationship marketing is a strategy designed to foster customer loyalty, interaction and long-term engagement. Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) is designed to develop strong connections with customers by providing them with information directly suited to their needs and interests and by promoting open communication. This approach often results in increased word-of-mouth activity, repeat business and a willingness on the customer’s part to provide information to the organisation.

Relationship marketing contrasts with transactional marketing, an approach that focuses on increasing the number of individual sales. Most organisations combine elements of both relationship and transaction marketing strategies. The elements of RM are quality, customer service and marketing. The relationship is developed by satisfying customers, adding value, privilege, customer orientation, use of database, quality products, etc.

RM activities: "e-commerce, online selling, network marketing, direct marketing, B2B and B2C business models. Relationship marketing has long been a feature of B2B marketing. Examples in consumer or B2C marketing include – supermarket loyalty, direct and database marketing, after sales service, etc".

Knowledge management has demonstrated a number of benefits and has offered justification for further implementation. The internet facilitated its development and growth via fast and timely sharing of knowledge. By sharing knowledge and organisation creates exponential benefits from the knowledge as people learn from it. This makes business processes faster and more effective and empowers employees in a unique way, for example e-mail.

The goal of KM is to capture the tacit knowledge required be a business process and encourage knowledge workers to share and communicate knowledge with peers. With such knowledge, it is easier to determine which processes are more effective or less effective than others.

The ways that ICT can support the CRM process in a organisation

CRM can be viewed as an extension of relationship marketing, a marketing paradigm that focuses on satisfying customers’ needs through the development of close personal relationships, interactions, and social exchanges between the business and its costumers, with ICT. CRM expands upon this concept with its emphasis on information and draws upon ICT to further enhance its strength and capabilities. By taking advantage of computing power and high speed communication networks over the internet, CRM allows businesses to quickly learn about and consequently better respond to their customers’ needs and expectation with innovative customised products and services.

ICT cover the technological means for handing information and aiding communications. It involves information and communication channels as well as hardware and software uses to generate, prepare, transmit and store data.

Generally, marketing applications of ICT in CRM fall into two general categories: marketing process automation and marketing intelligence.

Marketing process automation concentrates on building information distribution efficiencies through the use of ICT. It often involves the use of database system to collect and store customer and sales data, and the subsequent generation of reports for marketing analysis and planning. The use of ICT and internet has helps improve fundamental channel management and communication efficiencies between organisations in sharing information to coordinate their activities.

On contrast, marketing intelligence entails knowledge discovery techniques, such as online analytical processing, data mining, and intelligent agents, programs that search for information over a broad rages of data sources, and focuses on gaining greater insights into customer behaviour and market opportunities. Consequently, ICT has gained greater attention in marketing intelligence.