I am currently studying about CRM at my university. I have several books on CRM which indicate that "CRM is not the same as Traditional Customer Management" , but there is no books written about "Traditional Customer Management" in detail. What is "Traditional Customer Management"? Also, what are the differences and similarities between "CRM" and "Traditional Customer Management"?
A: The traditional "Customer Management" is a term used in the "Customer Satisfaction Management" (CS Movement). Company-Wide Promotion of CS "Customer Satisfaction" (By Tetsuo Takeda, 1993, Diamond company) well describes the subject. Raising customer satisfaction is emphasized as being the business philosophy, explaining how employees should approach customers with a spirit of service and the mannerism of communicating with customers. In other words, "Traditional Customer Management" is to analyze customer data, but lay its focus on communication management between the company (sales) and customers.
(* Reference ⇒ Article by Eiichi Takumi, Nikkei Marketing Journal http://www.crma-j.org/elibrary/nikkei03826.html）
The original definition of CRM is not "customer management" but "Customer Relationship Management". CRM is characterized by "Relationship". The term "Relationship" indicates that sales companies and wholesale companies are customers to the manufacturers. But to the manufacturer, the user is the "Customer to the Customer". This relationship does not refer only to relationships that are targeted to direct customers, but also refer to complicated customer viewpoints such as "Customer to the Customer" and "Corporate to the Customers" including sales companies. For example, Japanese manufactures can not be taken into consideration that the relationship with the sales company will worsen with direct sales companies which provides e-commerce such as Dell.
The characteristic of CRM is that it emphasizes the way the whole system works between organizations of such companies. The strategy of creating a "total optimization" system, within the restructuring process of the original structure of a company within the customer relationship, using the same process is emphasized. From this point of view, it may seem that "Customer Satisfaction Management", which keeps the customer satisfaction to the level of management standards, is similar to CRM which grasps the scientific causal relation of profitability (ROI), but the contents are 180 degrees different. For details, please refer to "Entrance into CRM" (TOYO KEIZAI INC. 2000), by Eiichi Takeda.
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