Customer Relationship Management Over the last several years, customer relationship management (CRM) has become an area which is helping firms to reduce costs and increase productivity. This is because it is focusing on offering small, medium and large sized businesses with number of solutions to streamline their operations. While at the same time, they are utilizing technology to integrate various solutions together. The most notable include: technical support, sales, marketing and

The communication system may be able to facilitate the transfer of information, but an essential component of a CRM system is the transfer of responsibility. Somebody at the company must be responsible for every customer issue that arises. This is the only way that the company can ensure that its customers' needs are truly being met. Because of this need for responsibility, it is essential that customer relationship management

This program helps users include articles that their customers find interesting, and to promote their products and services. This program also includes numerous discounts. The objective of this program is represented by building brands and reaching certain categories of customers (UNFI, 2011). United Natural Foods' customers are represented by smaller, medium, and larger retailers. Some of them are store departments, while other focus on selling organic products. When collecting information

just an isolated or siloed strategy. Gartner's definition is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Gartner Group's Eight Levels of CRM Gartner has defined CRM using both purely technologically-based approaches and the processes that occur in any company looking to serve customers. Yet the most important area of this graphic is the interaction of the valued customer experience and organizational collaboration. At the store level of the example of the manager

Today, it is becoming much clearer that the use of social media in building customer relationships is no longer a matter of individual choice. With the greater use and adoption of these sites, most organizations, which do not aggressively use them will always find themselves locked out of very lucrative markets and thereby unable to compete in the increasingly challenging business environment effectively. These sites are no longer reserved to

The majority are in the Developing Phase (45%) with just 3% in Optimizing. This indicates that there is a strong need for greater integration of social networking, permission marketing and customer information management in many e-commerce strategies today. The results shown in Figure 3 also indicates there is significant upside potential for companies who attempt to grow quickly through the integration of social networking, trust-based permission marketing based on