Content area
Full Text
Keywords
Business-to-business marketing, Customer satisfaction, Management, Electronic commerce
Abstract
Customer relationship management (CRM) and business to-business (B2B) are essential to the success of modern business. Although they are two different modules, they share many similarities. The integration of CRM and B2B will benefit all related parties in business processes, including sales, marketing, customer service, and information support. This article discusses the characteristics, similarities, and differences of B2B and CRM. It also explores the CRM-B2B integration strategies, the current issues and their future development trends.
Characteristics of CRM
Sweeney Group defines customer relationship management (CRM) as "all the tools, technologies and procedures to manage, improve, or facilitate sales, support and related interactions with customers, prospects, and business partners throughout the enterprise" (Davenport et al., 2001). This broad definition involves CRM in every process of a business transaction. A welldesigned CRM shares the characteristics (shown in Table I) as:
* Relationship management. The features include instant service response based on customer input, one-to-one solutions to customers' requirements, direct online communications with customer anytime and anywhere, and customer service centers that help customers solve their questions.
* Salesforce automation. The functions include automation of sales promotion analysis, automatically tracking a client's account history for repeated sales or future sales, and coordinating sales, marketing, call centers, and retail outlets to realize the salesforce automation.
* Use of technology. It includes enabling new technology and skills to deliver value, using technology to make "up-to-thesecond" customer data available, and applying data-warehousing technology to aggregate transaction information, to merge the information with CRM solutions, and to provide key performance indicators.
* Opportunity management. The features include the flexibility to manage unpredictable growth and demand and a good forecasting model to integrate sales history with sales projections.
Characteristics of B2B
B2B enables a business to interact with another business electronically, in particular via the Web. The benefits of the B2B solution are many, some of which include: increase productivity, reduce potential staff overhead, and clear audit trailing (Yang and Papazoglou, 2000). Different from business-toconsumers (B2C), B2B models not only contain elements of some profitable B2C models (e.g. auctions), but also are based on more attractive economic principles. Most importantly B2B reflects what the Internet does better than the offline...