Directorate of distance education

Lesson 5.3 - Customer Relationship Management
Learning Objectives
After reading this lesson you will be able to 
➢ Define and understand the concept of CRM
➢ Understand the concept of SCM
➢ Understand the overview of ERP
➢ Understand the concept of ILM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
The client is generally the main source of income for enterprises. 
However, as business is changing, in particularly as a result of the 
integration of new technologies in client-enterprise relations, competition 
is becoming increasingly stiffer, and clients may therefore chose their 
suppliers or change them with a simple click. Client’s criteria of choice 
are, in particular, financial criteria, responsiveness of the enterprise, but 
also purely affective criteria (need for recognition, need to be heard, etc.) 
In an increasingly competitive world, enterprises who wish to increase 
their profits therefore have several alternatives:
➢ Increase the margin for each client,
➢ Increase the number of clients,
➢ Increase the life cycle of the client, i.e. increase client loyalty.
New technologies allow enterprises to better know their clientele 
and to gain their loyalty by using pertinent information in such a manner 
as to better gage their needs and therefore better respond to them. It has 
been found that turning a client into a loyal client costs five times less 
than recruiting new clients. For that reason, a large number of enterprises 
design their strategy around services proposed to their clients.

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Notes
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Defining CRM?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) intends to provide 
technological solutions which make it possible to strengthen the 
communication between the company and its clients in order to improve 
the relationship with the clientele through atomization of the different 
components of the client relationship:
➢
Pre-sales:
Refers to marketing, consisting in studying the market, 
i.e. the needs of clients and identifying prospects. Analyzing the 
client information collected allow the enterprise to revise its 
product selection to more closely match expectations. Enterprise 
Marketing Automation (EMA) consists in automating marketing 
campaigns.
➢
Sales
: Sales forces automation (SFA), consists in providing piloting 
tools to businesses to assist them in their prospecting measures 
(contact management, sales meeting management, relaunch 
management, but also assistance with the preparation of business 
proposals, etc).
➢