Customer Relationship Management is very important from a firm’s perspective to get better at business and understand the needs of the customer to develop a better product. In this regard Gartner came up with 5 different cost-effective ways that will help improve the customer relationship management system.

Analytic :
Gartner suggests the use of extensive analytical tools to generate reports and then analyze trends associated with customer. Buying patterns of the customer, attrition in customer base, highs and lows of customer interaction could all indicate what the customer wants and expects.

Customer Community Setup :
Social networking is getting more and more popular these days. Gartner advices to use this networking buzz to take a step closer towards the customer. Opening a corporate account on networking sites like FaceBook will help interact and understand the problems of the customer directly. Two advantages are to give the customer more comfort about the service of the firm and secondly understand what needs to be done better to satisfy the customer.

Segmentation of customer base :
Using the resources to devise strategies for various segmentation bases of customers is a better strategy than to conduct research on less important things like return on investment of projects and implementation of newer applications. Spending more time instead on existing customer base and understanding the effectiveness of strategies used to broaden the base is a more important function for firms to follow.

Redesigning the process :
Gartner suggests stepping back and looking at the process again. This might point out a few loopholes especially the silo-structure of divisions. Bringing them together and redesigning the process could help cut down on costs, increasing the efficiency and better understanding of the business by all divisions. The final product delivered to the customer would also be better because of better leveraging of expertise.

Organizational Change :
Recession has brought about a change in the way companies are thinking and the new strategies being laid out. With more focus on getting customers and delivering better product and service, organizations are changing their traditional silo structure and moving towards greater co-operation and collaboration of front and back ends. What this does is created greater awareness amongst all the employees across divisions about the need of the customer thus enabling more focused growth and evolution. The resources could be utilized better for optimum performance by changing the structure form being product-centric to customer-centric, which will mean doing what suits the customer best.