What Is CRM?

What Is CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) uses information technology to create a cross-functional enterprise system that integrates and automates many of the customer-serving processes in sales, marketing and customer services that interact with a company’s customers.

Contact and Account Management

CRM software helps sales, marketing, and service professionals capture and track relevant data about every past and planned contact with prospects and customers, as well as other business and life cycle events of customers.

Sales

A CRM system provides sales reps with the software tolls and company data sources they need to support and manage their sales activities and optimize cross-selling and up-selling. Cross-selling is an approach in which a customer of one product or service might also be interested in purchasing a related product of service. Up-selling refers to the process of finding ways to sell a new or existing customer a better product than they are actually seeking.

Marketing and Fulfillment

CRM systems help marketing professionals accomplish direct marketing campaigns by automating such tasks as qualifying leads for targeted marketing and scheduling and tracking direct marketing mailings. Then the CRM software helps marketing professionals capture and manage prospect and customer response data in the CRM database and analyze the customer and business value of a company’s direct marketing campaigns. CRM also assists in the fulfillment of prospect and customer responses and requests by quickly scheduling sales contacts and providing appropriate information about products and services to them, while capturing relevant information for the CRM database.

Customer Service and Support

A CRM system provides service reps with software tolls and real-time access to the common customer database shared by sales and marketing professionals. CRM helps customer service managers create, assign, and manage requests for service by customers.

Retention and Loyalty Programs

Enhancing and optimizing customer retention and loyalty is a major business strategy and primary objective of customer relationship management. CRM systems try to help a company identify, reward, and market to their most loyal and profitable customers.

Telecommunications Media

Telecommunications Media

Telecommunications media include twisted-pair wire, coaxial cables, and fiber-optic cables, all off which physically link the devices in a network. Also included are terrestrial microwave, communications satellites, cellular phone systems and packet and LAN radio, all of which use microwave and other radio waves. In addition, there are infrared systems, which use infrared light to transmit and receive data.

Wired Technologies

Twisted-Pair Wire

The ordinary telephone wire, consisting of copper wire twisted into pairs, the twisted-pair wire, is the most widely used medium for telecommunications.

Coaxial Cable

Coaxial cable consists of a sturdy copper or aluminum wire wrapped with spacers to insulate and protect it

Fiber Optics

Fiber optics uses cables consisting of one or more hair-thin filaments of glass fiber wrapped in a protective jacket. The transmitting speed of fiber is hundreds of times faster than coaxial cable and thousands of times better than twisted-pair wire.

The Problem of “The Last Mile”

The last mile is the final leg of a cable TV, telephone or other telecommunications network that ends in the user's household. The problem is the telecommunications provider adopts a new, faster, better technology that can provide higher bandwidth and faster telecommunication speeds to consumers. The house it is connected to is wired with twisted-pair wiring that simply cannot handle the bandwidth provided by fiber.

Did you mean that?

The Intentionality Debate Some communication researchers have strongly favored the view that only intentional behaviors are communicative. Miller and Steinberg (1975): "We have chosen to restrict our discussion of communication to intentional symbolic transactions: those in which at least one of the parties transmits a message to another with the intent of modifying the other’s behavior…By our definition, intent to communicate and intent to influence are synonymous. If there is no intent, there is no message."

They argue that only intentionally sent and accurately received messages can be called communication.

On the other hand, for instance, Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson (1967) state that: “you cannot not communicate.” This way of thinking reflects the notion that all things could be considered communication. According to this way of thinking, when two people are together, they constantly communicate because they cannot escape behavior. Even silence and avoidance of eye contact could than be considered communicative. One can say nothing and still say something. Adherents of this theory believe that anything we do, including ignoring or refusing to speak to another, is communication. This greatly broadens the definition of communication, making it virtually synonymous with behavior.

Although this line of thinking has enjoyed much popular support, it is potentially problematic for those of us interested in communication theory. To be fair, one of the original proponents of the “you cannot not communicate” arguments later recanted her original thinking by concluding that “all behavior is not communicative, although it may be informative.” So, perhaps they where just a littebit right, but certainly not all!

What is communication?

Everyone knows it, everyone does it… What am I talking about? No… not sex! I’m talking about communication and communicating! Or should it be the other way around? Communicating and communication… Something we all do on a daily basis, but what exactly is communicating? During this study I've learned that: 

Communication

is a social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and interpret meaning in their environment.

First, we tend to believe that communication is a social process. When interpreting communication as social, we mean to suggest that it involves peoples and interactions. This necessarily includes two people, a sender and a receiver. Both play an integral role in the communication process.

And when communication is social, it involves people who come to an interaction with various intentions, motivations, and abilities. To suggest that communication is a process means that it is ongoing and unending. But I've my doupts on with this claim, cause communicating (in my opinion) mostly has a beginning and an ending. And if it does not have a proper ending, you could be considered rued. Communications is also dynamic, complex, and continually changing. With this view of communication, we emphasize the dynamics of making meaning.

The process nature of communication also means that much can happen from the beginning, of a conversation to the end. See, there Í'm talking about an end again! People may end (again, an end! haha) up at a very different place once a discussion begins. Communication, therefore, can be considered a process that changes over time and among interactants.

The Internet Revolution

The Internet Revolution

The explosive growth of the Internet is a revolutionary phenomenon in computing and telecommunications. The Internet has become the largest and most important network of networks today and has evolved into a global information superhighway. The Internet does not have a central computer system or telecommunications centre. There are 13 root servers that are used to handle the bulk of the routing of traffic from on computer to another.

Internet Service Providers

Nobody owns the Internet. An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet to individuals and organizations.

Internet Applications

The most popular internet applications are e-mail, instant messaging, browsing the sites on the World Wide Web, and participating in newsgroups and chat rooms.

Business Use of the Internet

Business use of the internet has expanded from an electronic information exchange to a broad platform for strategic business applications.

The Business Value of the Internet

Most companies are building e-business and e-commerce Web sites to achieve six major business values:

• Generate new revenue from online sales.
• Reduce transaction costs through online sales and customer support.
• Attract new customers via Web marketing and advertising and online sales.
• Increase the loyalty of existing customers via improved Web customer service and support.
• Develop new Web-based markets and distribution channels for existing products.
• Develop new information-based products accessible on the Web.

“Hechte vriendschap vormen via online communicatie blijkt toch lastig”

Even tussendoor... voor de Dutch followers, een Nederlandstalige blog!

“Hechte vriendschap vormen via online communicatie blijkt toch lastig”

Onlinecommunicatie is hip, de sociale netwerksites worden druk bezocht en Twitteren lijkt het nieuwe sms’en te worden. Hyves, Facebook, Myspace, volop sociale media om jezelf online te profileren, contacten te vinden en te onderhouden. Al bestaande vriendschappen kunnen nieuw leven ingeblazen worden via korte online berichtjes en notificaties. En nieuwe vriendschappen en connecties wachten om gevormd te worden.

Maar wat is dan een online vriendschap precies? Een online vriendschap kenmerkt zich als een type vriendschap welke begint en zich verder ontwikkelt via computer mediated communicatie (CMC).  Volgens Grand H. L. Cheng (2006), die onderzoek heeft gedaan naar de kwaliteit van online relaties, is de algemene kwaliteiten van offline relaties hoger beoordeeld dan die van online relaties. Echter, naarmate er meer tijd verstrijkt trekt dit meer naar elkaar toe. Ook uit onderzoek van Parks en Floyd (1996) blijkt dat algemene vriendschapsbeoordelingen voor online relaties significant lager zijn dan die voor offline relaties.

Daarnaast laat onderzoek naar Hyves van Antheunis en Schouten (2007) zien, dat een sociale netwerk site als Hyves FtF vriendencontact niet kan vervangen en blijft dit FtF contact noodzakelijk om een goede vriend te kunnen maken. Het resultaat van het onderzoek van Ellison, Stienfield en Lampe (2007) kon zich verenigen met deze uitspraak. Hieruit kwam naar voren dat Facebook een veel groter effect had op het tijdelijke interesse netwerk, dan op de hechtere vriendschappen welke meer affectie behelzen.

Bovenstaande onderzoeken geven dus allen aan dat FtF contact noodzakelijk blijft voor het vormen en onderhouden van goede vriendschappen. Echte harde uitspraken over hechtheid van vriendschappen zijn er nog niet gedaan. Ook omdat dit waarschijnlijk een moeilijk operationaliseer baar begrip betreft. Vooralsnog lijken sociale netwerksites als Hyves en Facebook een leuke aanvulling op ons (bestaande) contact, maar op zichzelf toch niet in staat tot het vormen van hechte contacten.

Nieuws: Bof op UvT

Van de GGD:

Bof op Universiteit Tilburg

De GGD Hart voor Brabant krijgt de laatste weken meer meldingen van bof, onder andere van studenten aan de Universiteit van Tilburg. Sinds december 2009 circuleert de bof onder universiteitsstudenten in Nederland.

Voor meer info, zie: http://www.ggdhvb.nl/nl-NL/Actueel/Nieuws/Bof%20op%20Universiteit%20Tilburg