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.

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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