Reflections Week Twelve: CRM

Today in class we talked about Customer Relationship Management in different settings, and how CRM has changed with the introduction of the internet and virtual communities.
My group, the Bugs, presented our group project about CRM in an vitual community, and how this would differ from real world CRM. Of course CRM in the real world and CRM in a virtual community is more or less the same thing, however, we do believe that there will be some differences. In a virtual world an advantage of CRM is, that every move by the potential customer can be tracked more easily. When every move is made online, this can potentilly be tracked and logged, as we already see it when for example Amazon comes up with new suggestions for you. In the beginning I though this was a little bit creepy, however, now I'm getting more used to it, and you see everywhere if you do online purchaces. Hence, I believe this to be one of the main advantages and differences between real worl CRM and virtual CRM, the ease of tracking and logging information about the costumers.

Another issue we discussed was how virtual CRM might be more honest in a sense, since the customer can kind of hide behind its avatar. This might mean that the customer might be more brave, or even do or say things that he or she would not do or say in real life, as the customer can appear somehow anynomous hiding behind the avatar.

I've personally spent a considerable amount of time working with CRM, as I've worked in B2B sales, selleing ERP and CRM systems to small and medium sized businesses. Doing that made me realize the importance of a CRM system, and we would log every conversation, every email, every fax, and every piece of information that went between us and the customers. Our system would automatically recognize email adresses in Outlook, and save the emails to the CRM system. In that way we would always have the latest info on the customer in the database, and if I was sick and one of my customers called in, one of my colleagues would be able to see exactly what I've been talking to that specific customer about. This tool was extremely handy, and I don't think that any large cooperation can really survive without it.