It is a worldwide focus on customers, covered now in popular media and within corporate boardrooms around the world. Never before has there been such a focus on keeping customers coming back. Perhaps the closest business movement was the customer satisfaction efforts of the 1980s. These customer satisfaction initiatives, however, often ended with common means of measuring, but not necessarily improving, customer satisfaction. CRM identifies how to profitably act on that premise, at all times, across all channels and functions.
Customers make buying decisions based on more than just price and more than just product.
Customers make buying decisions based on their overall experience, which involves product and price, but also includes the nature of all their interactions with you. There is a universal, underlying cycle of activity that should drive all CRM initiatives. All initiatives and infrastructure development should somehow be linked to this core cycle of activity. As a cycle, the stages are interdependent and continuous. They are interdependent in that you cannot implement some stages without the others.