The three letters you need: CRM

We find ourselves in the era of consumers. They are the core and everything sits around them. For that reason, it is essential that we know as much as we possibly can about them. In fact, information is the key to satisfying their needs and preparing a successful communication strategy, amongst other things. Here comes Customer Relationship Management into play. CRM is an asset to every business, a way of collecting, managing and sharing internally information about our consumers.

In other words, it is a set of information systems that permit an organisation to contact their customers and obtain, store and analyse data in order to comprehend their motivations and behaviour.

But, how do we obtain this information? We need to interact with consumers; not only current ones, but also potential ones, and utilise tools such as data mining. By allowing visitors register and subscribe to our newsletter, creating user portals or offering customer service we can generate that sort of valuable data. So, next time a consumer sends us an email or a tweet to present a suggestion, file a complaint or ask for instructions in the use of our products, let's make sure we take advantage of it (responsibly). What practical utility does all of this offer? Well, it allows us to predict behaviour by finding patterns when analysing data.