CRM Glossary

CRM Glossary

Business software has many acronymns and terminology that can be very confusing. We have developed a comprehensive CRM glossry to help you better understand what everything means.

Account Management provides a strategic approach to maintaining high value customers and turning them into long time satisfied clients by gathering intelligence on organizational structure, individual roles, responsibilities, and competitor data. It allows businesses to tailor client-specific offerings, improve forecasting, and better understand their customers by providing a 360 degree view of all company interactions, across all departments.

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Automatic Call Distribution intelligently handles and routes incoming calls based on business-specific criteria, such as next available employee, specific skill set, workload, group, geography, and more.

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The continuous process of measuring producers, services, and practices against competitors or recognized industry leaders. It is an ongoing activity that is intended to improve performance and can be applied to all facets of operation. Benchmarking requires a measurement mechanism so that the performance gap can be identified.

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A process or methodology that has been proven, through experience and research, to work well and produce successful results, and is therefore recommended as a model. A best practice is a well-defined method that contributes to the successful completions of a process or task. Some of the more commonly used best practices could be quality control or change management.

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(see Reporting and Analytics)

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Represents business that is conducted primarily between two businesses, as opposed to business-to-consumer (B2C).

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Represents business that is conducted between a business and end users or customers. Selling goods directly to consumers is considered B2C. This distinction is important when comparing Web sites that are B2B, as the entire business model, strategy, execution, and fulfillment is different.

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A call center is a central place or network of places where customer and other telephone calls are handled by an enterprise. Call Centers are used by any large enterprise that uses the telephone to sell or service products and services. Typically, a call center provides intelligent call handling, routing, and call scripting. Call centers have the ability to automatically handle a considerable volume of calls at the same time, to screen them, and then to forward the calls to qualified personnel.

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Campaign management track, manages, and monitors all marketing efforts for direct mail, telemarketing, print publications, customer service, point of sale, email, and the Web. It allows businesses to easily set up and manage multi-channel campaigns, while providing real time ROI and performance reports to pinpoint problems or spot new opportunities. For example, Campaign Management methodologies can track the effectiveness of an email campaign by seeing how many emails were sent, how many were read, and then provide metrics that can help guide future efforts.

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Combining data with voice systems in order to enhance telephone services. For example, automatic number identification (ANI) allows a caller's records to be retrieved from the database while the call is routed to the appropriate party. Automatic telephone dialing from an address list is an outbound example.

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Traditional call centers handle voice-only customer contact, whereas contact centers include all types of channels of customer interaction, including voice (telephone, IVR, speech recognition, and voice verification), the Web, fax, video, email, and mail. Service-based environment where agents handle all types of contacts regarding sales, customer service, marketing, telemarketing, collections, and more.

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Contact Management solutions provide a central location for client contact information, such as address, competitor products purchased, literature requests, subscriptions, or training courses attended.

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Contract Management solutions help ease contract creation and the negotiation process by providing a comprehensive library of templates containing standard pre-approved clauses and business terms, such as product, pricing, and benefit information that can be accessed quickly. Contract Management provides a complete process for presenting contract versions online or offline to external parties, capturing the ongoing dialog, tracking modifications, and comparing language across contract iterations. In general, a Contract Management solution will provide directory services, contract information, transaction information and compliance workflows.

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Customer Analytics analyzes data about an enterprise's customers and presents it so that better and quicker business decisions can be made. CRM analytics can be considered a form of online analytical processing (OLAP) and may employ data mining.

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Customer relationship management (CRM) moves a company from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric focus. CRM is a business strategy that aims to understand, anticipate, and manage the needs of an organization’s most important asset, its customers. CRM is software coupled with traditional marketing, sales, and support methods that are used to retain and improve customer loyalty. The goal is to build a focused relationship with each customer based on their unique needs and a company’s ability to satisfy those needs while improving customer satisfaction levels.

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Empowers customers by giving them a self-directed way to interact with your business, at any time they deem convenient.

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Customer service is the provision of labour and other resources, for the purpose of increasing the value that buyers receive from their purchases and from the processes leading up to the purchase. With the rising dominance of the service sector in the global economy, customer service has grown in importance, as its impact on individuals, households, firms, and societies has become widespread.

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Dashboards provide real time data feedback about particular performance measures. Called a dashboard because the data presentation often looks like the dashboard of a car, with dials and gauges representing specific details of an organization.

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An ability to solve the problems associated with storing, managing, and extracting information from the numerous data sets being used by an organization.

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The promotion of products or services via email. When used properly, email marketing is one of the most effective forms of online advertising.

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Email Response Management enables companies to manage email responses through workflow processes that enable automated responses to email inquiries or routing of email inquiries based on pre-defined business rules.

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An automated telephone information system that speaks to the caller with a combination of fixed voice menus and real time data from databases. The caller responds by pressing digits on the telephone or speaking words or short phrases. IVR systems allow callers to get information 24 hours a day. IVRs are used as a front end to call centers in order to offload as many calls as possible, rather than forward them to more costly human agents.

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Knowledge management is a business process that leverages a firm’s intellectual assets. It enables customer service and help desk organizations to access and deliver answers via phone, email, or the Web. It manages an organization’s knowledge base of customer data so information is easily available to phone agents.

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Once leads have been acquired, assignment rules automate the routing process to the most appropriate agent. This could be based on a list of requirements, customized for any company. Rules for assigning an agent could include: location, experience, size of deal, language, availability, and more.

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Managing leads effectively and optimizing lead flow across sales and marketing are critical to sales success. With Lead Management, companies can track prospect inquiries and route qualified leads to the right people so sales reps get instant access to the latest prospects and leads are never dropped or lost.

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Marketing automation allows a company to monitor overall company performance of marketing programs and activities. It focuses on the definition, scheduling, and tracking of all marketing activities, and provides analytics and reporting on Web campaigns. It includes the identification of target markets, advertising delivery, budget definition, results analysis, and other related activities. Specific tasks tackled by marketing automation programs include: Lead Management, Campaign Management, Data Mining, and Intelligent Marketing Assistance, and more.

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Helps close deals faster by providing a single place for updating deal information, tracking opportunity milestones, and recording all opportunity-related interactions, making it easier for managers to monitor sales pipelines.

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Order Management enables companies to streamline and automate the entire sales order management process, from order promising and order capture to transportation and shipment.

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Partner Relationship Management is the application of specific strategies and technologies that assist the unique needs of indirect sales channels. CRM and PRM systems help businesses develop and sustain profitable customer and partner relationships.

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Pipeline management collects data and analyzes active opportunities that allow sales agents and business management to better understand and manage qualified deals. Pipeline management allows businesses to view all current sales activity in real time, identifying trends, bottlenecks, personnel performance trends, and effectiveness metrics, such as average length of sales cycle, win rates, and other critical information needed during the sales cycle. It allows businesses to remain flexible and adjust quickly to changing strategic business actions.

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A Web site that combines elements of targeted information relevant to a given audience. For example, a company might set up a customer portal, giving clients 24/7 access to business information.

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Automates quality assurance processes and provides a link between customer support, engineering, marketing, and the customer.

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Sales Analytics enables sales reps and managers to view and analyze their sales pipelines, perform win-loss analyses, stay ahead of competitive trends, and more.

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Sales Force Automation enables Sales teams to capture and maintain lead and other contact information in one data base, conduct team selling, view pipeline reports, and other tasks. It is the process that supports sales representatives by providing access to contact details, appointments, sales opportunities, customer purchase history, order management, and much more. Many times, this is the primary objective of most companies implementing a CRM solution.

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Usually part of the sales module of a CRM solution. Territory Management allows companies to effectively manage geographies, sales personnel, and leads while aligning resources with opportunities.

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When evaluating software, you must also consider, in addition to the costs of the software licenses, what are the ongoing maintenance fees, support costs, training, etc. You also need to consider how much time and money it will cost to own the software over the long term. TCO considers all the costs that might be associated with a software solution over its lifespan in the company.

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Voice Over IP provides the ability to carry on a conversation over the Internet, while still browsing the Internet. It is the transmission of real time voice calls over a data network that uses IP. Typically requires broadband (DSL, cable, or LAN based connections).

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Web analytics is the process of analyzing the behavior of visitors to a Web site. It refers to the measurement, analysis, and reporting of Web site usage by visitors. Web analytics can include tracking the clicks and drilldown behavior of customers within the Web site, determining from which sites customers arrive, tracking and analyzing online behavior. This data helps site managers better understand the visitor, effectiveness of the site, and future needs of the Web site by addressing content, merchandising, designs, and more.

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CRM application that provides full access to users via the Web, ensuring data security and integrity.

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Workflow Management is the automation of policies and procedures, resulting in improved customer services, in a marketing campaign or a sales process.

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