What is the relationship between direct marketing and customer relationship management?

Are there documented cases that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) works?

• Are there documented cases that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) works?

• Answer:

  Hi chilebean, Thanks for the question. And I hope the information and analysis I have provided will aid you with your question. I started of by doing a generalised search for CRM Success stories. After following a few links I came upon a consulting site that suggests that CRM initiatives in the Telecommunitications industry were providing postive benefits. This was initiated by Fujitsu Consulting: [ http://consulting.fujitsu.com/News/PR/AxW2Z3Amfx.html ] Some of the success stories mentioned included massive returns on investment in the case of Sprint who reaped the benefits of having used CRM. "Sprint has switched almost its entire mass-marketing budget for consumer long-distance services to "precision" marketing programs that are enabled by CRM technology, a move that has improved returns on various direct-marketing campaigns from 65% to 300%." From the same search I came across the intellibusiness site which has a Success story section which details some successful CRM implementations. It should be noted however that many of these stories come directly from various vendors of CRM solutions. However, they serve the purpose of highlighting that CRM does indeed work. There were so many success stories and evidence that CRM works that it was difficult to work out the best way to proceed. The full list of success stories can be obtained from: [http://www.intellibusiness.com/success.asp?category=CRM ] I have therefore decided to put down a couple of examples below of successful CRM implementations and the benefits the company received from the CRM solution. I hope that this will be enough for your needs. One particular example is the implementation of CRM solution by the company SAS for the company Travelocity.com: [ http://www.intellibusiness.com/success_detail.asp?ID=1709&company=SAS ] This implementation succeeded in allowing Travelocity.com to achieve a 200% increase of responses to a marketing campaign for preferred members. I found the full article on the SAS website at: [ http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/041502/news8.html ] Another example I found, again from the Intellibusiness website was a CRM solution for the Bradford & Bingley building society: [ http://www.intellibusiness.com/success_detail.asp?ID=1723&company=Innovative+Systems ] This system enabled the Bradford & Bingley to save millions in their efforts to become a Limited Company. The process of demutualisation meant that the customer records had to be check for accuracy and errors. The CRM solution however made sure that this was done swiftly and accurately. The full article is available at: [ http://www.innovativesystems.com/success/bradford.htm ] I hope that the few examples that I have given is enough to help you see that CRM works. There is a whole wealth of successful CRM implementations out there. These solutions save not just time but also money, in some cases generated further rewards such as increased revenue and better customer satisfaction. In some cases its just simple things like increased efficiency as in the case of Virgin.net's CRM solution which allowed them to double their productivity for email marketing: [ http://www.intellibusiness.com/rdetail.asp?ID=632 ] [ http://www.kana.com/cgi-bin/kana/kana/jsp/newsevents/archive/PressReleases2002/2002_0326_vi.jsp ] I hope I have managed to answer you question. Regards aziphirael