CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them.  The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.
With a CRM system, you can manage your contacts and customer activities, enforce your business strategy with technology to consistently meet customer needs, share a single 360-degree view of your customers with your company, and personalize new and ongoing customer interactions to cost-effectively acquire, nurture, and retain good customers.
Almost every organization needs some method of managing their client relationships. ACA Technologies is dedicated to helping its clients improve business performance by acquiring, retaining and growing profitable customers. We help clients focus their customer-facing resources to improve the performance of marketing, sales and service initiatives.
Whilst much emphasis is put on enabling customer-facing teams to create and maintain relationships with external clients, traditionally efforts to aid departments in working with internal customers has been limited. Accounts, IT and human resources all provide services and products to employees – ‘customers’ – within their company, to differing degrees of success.
So as a potential solution to this conundrum, ACA recognizes internal customer relationship management as much as external CRM, a concept that should be welcomed with open arms in corporate offices the world over.
Internal organizations that are pursuing internal customer relationship management include human resources (HR), finance, facilities management, supply chain management and information management.
All of these company divisions provide critical services to other employees – their internal customers. In fact, with the exception of accounts receivable, most of these departments have no contact with external customers. However, large companies are increasingly removing the mandates that employees must use internal organizations for all services. In fact, companies such as Sony allow business lines to choose whether they use shared services, develop their own expertise or go outside the organization for services such as HR, purchasing and contracting. With this increasing competition, internal organizations are now forced to consider CRM as a way to maintain their franchises. They are looking at CRM as a framework to demonstrate value and cement customer loyalty. Without CRM, many will find it very difficult to justify their existence long term.
At ACA we recognize these challenges and dynamics of these interactions, presenting even the most successful organizations with new challenges and opportunities. In this increasingly complex environment, ACA helps organizations chart a path to high performance through customer centricity.