Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM?

CRM is an enterprise wide business strategy designed to learn about customer’s needs and behaviors to organize and manage Customer relationships to maximize profitability and minimize expenses. A well planned CRM can be viewed as a strategic process merging strategy and system to amalgamate information from across the company (sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc.) to offer a complete view of the customer and develop stronger relationships with them. Information gained from all internal and in some cases, external, sources allows the company to complete a full 360 degree view of their customer in real time.

CRM allows customer facing representatives of the company to have all the information they require to ensure the best customer experience in interactions with your company and opportunities to increase revenues through increased cross and up selling opportunities to competitive positioning tactics.

CRM is focused on the customer from first contact to continued interaction, to gain insight with which to learn their needs and behaviors to ensure revenue maximization through relationship selling (upsell opportunities, customer ranking, etc.).

CRM layer
This layer represents databases that consist of the single customer view, integrated contact/dialogue, customer profile, and content information. This layer also provides for the ability to perform analytics and reporting on the customer experience by using the variety of knowledge gained from all customer activity.

Payments

Payment can refer to the paying or settlement of bills (receiving money from customers), recharging of prepaid balances, and a telecoms service offered to customers - mobile payment or m-payment.

M-payment is a alternative payment method whereby consumers or businesses can pay for goods and services using their mobile phone. There are four common types of m-payment:

• premium SMS-based transactional payments
• direct-to-bill payment
• mobile web payments
• contactless near field communication.

M-payment has been used in developed markets in Europe to pay for services such as parking, m-payment using a direct-to-bill model has utility for business customers in particular since the aggregation of small sums onto a single (telecoms) bill helps avoid the cost of processing expense claims.

Premium SMS is used extensively to pay for content such as ringtones and is a type of "reverse billing".

Closely related to m-payment is Mobile money - a type of mobile service pioneered in developing markets that typically had a less developed banking infrastructure and is now taking off in more mature Western markets. Mobile money enables mobile customers to use the mobile network to remotely transfer money to individuals who do not have bank accounts. It can also be used to pay for goods and services.

Rating

In revenue management, rating is the process of costing a call or service. A rating engine takes the data supplied by a mediation engine and applies rates (monetary values) to these. When calls or data services have been rated, these are then sent to a billing engine which aggregates the charges into bills.

A modern rating system must be able to adapt to constantly changing prices, as well as more complex rating scenarios. For competitive reasons, rate plans may change relatively frequently today, and likewise the rate plan may be complex - having been set up, for example, so that once usage has crossed a certain threshold then a lower rate applies. Likewise other credits, discounts, and special rules may apply and need to be taken into account when rating.

Like mediation, as rating increased in complexity a new breed of standalone, specialist rating vendors came to market. Over time, these have largely been acquired by billing vendor.