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the sum of a company’s customer service solutions
constitutes its customer relationship management (CRM)

system. Level of traffic at the online business site and the
available resources would normally determine whether or
not a business should have CRM. It provides fast and
effective service to customers and ensures that corrective
measures are readily in place. CRM includes call handling,
sales tracking and Transaction support
(technology/personnel etc.). Three tools can be used to
improve customer service, that is, log file analysis, cookies
and data mining. Under CRM system, call centers can be set
up having customer service representatives who can be
reached trough phone, e-mails or online chatting. There are
software tools or tracking devices that can provide feedback
on how many number of internet users actually viewed a
banner or a marketing message and how many actually
clicked on the advertisement. Log files consist of data
generated by site visits and include information about each
visitor’s location, IP address, time of visit, frequency of visits
etc. There are businesses that provide the services of
analyzing web log files. The results would show how effective
your web site is and indicate the top-referring web sites. You
know that cookies allow e-commerce sites to record visitor
behavior. They can be used to track customers online and do
personalization. Many customers do not know that their
information is being collected and used by the ebusiness site.
Thus, informational privacy rights of customers can be
breached in cases where cookies are used. One major goal of
CRM is to establish a long-lasting relationship between a
company and its customers. Good customer services can help
in building a sense of loyalty towards company and its
products or services. Experts have pointed out five stages of
loyalty as customer relationships develop over a period of
time. One can find that the intensity of relationship increases
as the customer moves through the first four stages. In the
fifth stage a decline occurs and the relationship terminates.
Awareness
This is the first stage where customers recognize the name of
the company or any of its products. However, they have
never interacted with the company before. A
company/business can achieve this level by properly
advertising its brand.
Exploration
At the exploration stage the potential customers know more
about the company or its products. For instance, they may
have visited the web site of the company and have
exchanged any information with it.
Page # 137
Familiarity
At this stage, customers have completed several business
transactions with the company and know its policies
regarding refund, privacy of information, discounts etc.
Commitment
Having completed a number of satisfactory transactions,
some customers may have developed a strong sense of
loyalty or preference for the products or brand of a company.
They are said to be at the commitment stage in their
relationship with a business. Such loyal customers often tell
others about their satisfaction as regards products/services
offered by the company. Sometimes, companies make
concessions on price or other terms of business to bring
customers into this stage.
Separation
After a period of time those conditions over which a valuable
customer relationship is established might change.
Customers might not be any longer satisfied with the product
quality or customer service. On the other hand, a company
may also find that a loyal customer is proving to be very
expensive to maintain. Thus, the parties enter into the
separation stage. Note that the objective of any marketing
strategy is to bring the customers quickly to the committed
stage and try to hold them there as long as possible.
Life Cycle Segmentation
These five stages are also called customer life cycle. Using
them to create groups of customers is called customer life-
cycle segmentation. Segment information is useful for
companies to develop better relationship with the
customers. Companies, thus, know about their customers
and their level of relationship with the company, and can
customize their product/service.
B2B Marketing on the Web
For effective CRM, it is necessary that there is complete
integration between different steps in a customer
transaction. So, the processes of selling, buying, marketing,
front-end and back-end operations should be fully linked and
integrated with each other. Key difference between B2C and
B2B is that in case of B2B there is no direct contact with the
end users, whereas this contact exists in B2C. Thus, an e-
business can have direct response or feedback from its
customers in B2C as compared to B2B. For example, an
online business that deals in the supply of raw material to an
online manufacturing business has a very limited chance of
receiving direct feedback from end customers about its
product/services due to lack of contact with them. That is
one reason why a marketing plan is different in B2B from
B2C.
Search Engines
A search engine is a program that scans web sites and forms
a list of relevant sites based on keywords or other search-
engines ranking criteria. It allows people to find information
about their area of interest out of large amount of
information available on the internet. Examples of famous e-
businesses that provide search engine facilities are google,
altavista, yahoo etc. As a marketer, after you have launched
your e-commerce web site, you should look for the
registration of the same with popular search engines so that
your site appears on search engine results.

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the sum of a company’s customer service solutions

constitutes its customer relationship management (CRM)

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