Customer Relations is viewed as one of the most vital pieces to running a long and successful business. Customers are the key to profit in any type of retail, sales, or service industry. The bigger and better ones customer base is, the bigger and better the company will be. It’s because of that that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is essential to know, understand, and practice within a business. CRM is a devised system for managing and tracking a company’s communications with its current and prospective customers (Goodman, 2014). These systems use technology tools to organize and track numbers and statistics from interaction for sales, customer service, marketing, and various other sales and support channels. With the increased knowledge of technology, the majority of all business’s someone would deal with on a regular basis, such as the coffee shop, grocery store, gas station, big box store, would be implementing their CRM system into the transaction. These interactions, where you enter in a rewards card, buy a certain products, answer a survey from the receipt, are all analyzed and synchronized into a system so that the management can break them down into statistics, and decide how to better themselves. Trying to understand the how and why and when the purchase was made will help with future marketing to the consumer. All of this information is used to target the customer again, to get them to come back into the store.
Studies have shown, it’s easier to keep the customers you have than to earn new ones. By implementing a successful CRM system and continuously using it, this is something that can happen. Professionals in the industry state that it takes anywhere from 5 – 10 times more cost, effort, and time, to earn new customers that it is to retain existing customers (Kotelnikov). Most, if not all, successful businesses are aware of this expense, and use