I have been writing about CRM.  Turns out Wikipedia has a good discussion on this topic.

There are three fundamental components in CRM:

1. Operational – automation of basic business processes (marketing, sales, service)
2. Analytical – analysis of customer data and behavior using business intelligence
3. Collaborative – communicating with clients

Source: Customer relationship management – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

These three components are defined here as follows:

Operational CRM

Sales force automation (SFA) 

SFA automates some of a company’s critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, performance management, lead management, account management, contact management and quote management.

Customer service and support (CSS) 

CSS automates certain service requests, complaints, product returns and enquiries.

Enterprise marketing automation (EMA) 

EMA provides information about the business environment, including information on competitors, industry trends, and macroenvironmental variables. EMA applications are used to improve marketing efficiency.

Analytical CRM

To enhance a company’s relationship with its clients. The results of an analysis can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns, for example:

• Acquisition: Cross-selling, up-selling
• Retention: Retaining existing customers (antonym: customer attrition)
• Information: Providing timely and regular information to customers

Other examples of the applications of analyses include:

• Contact optimization
• Evaluating and improving customer satisfaction
• Optimizing sales coverage
• Fraud detection
• Financial forecasts
• Price optimization
• Product development
• Program evaluation
• Risk assessment and management
• Strategic Marketing
• Operational marketing

Data collection and analysis is viewed as a continuing and iterative process. Ideally, business decisions are refined over time, based on feedback from earlier analyses and decisions. Most analytical CRM projects use a data warehouse to manage data.

Collaborative CRM

Focuses on the interaction with customers (personal interaction, letter, fax, phone, Internet, e-mail etc.)

• Providing efficient communication with customers across a variety of communications channels
• Providing online services to reduce customer service costs
• Providing access to customer information while interacting with customers

This is a highly theoretical view of CRM.  I like it but I don’t recognise this in my travels.   My observations to date:

CRM implementations include the following, but not necessarily automated or integrated:

1. Operational CRM:  customer service & support
2. Analytical CRM:  elements here like Fraud, and operational marketing, but non-integrated with 1.
3. Collaborative CRM:  most elements, but again, non integrated with 1. and 2.

Relevance to Bankwatch:

The vision for CRM is entirely relevant for Banks, but is way ahead of either capacity to afford, or certainly capacity to implement due to disparate systems.