Effective Customer Relationship Management through Web Services

Managing effective relationships with customers has become increasingly important in the era of constrained resources and global competition. The term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) encompasses all methodologies, strategies, tools, and other technology-based capabilities that help an enterprise organize and manage its customer relationships. The focus of CRM is on providing optimal value to customers through pre-sale interactions, sales process, and post-sale interactions. Especially for companies doing business online, either completely or partly, CRM is essential for a long-term survival and success. A major prerequisite to an efficient CRM effort is the complete view of the customer, which in turn requires data — a data that is complete, accurate, current, and in the right format. An equivalent of CRM in the business-to-business arena is Partner Relationship Management (PRM). For successful PRM also what is required is business-to-business application and data integration. This paper presents an overview of the issues related to lack of data consistency, and difficulties of data/application integration within a business and inter-business environments. It also discusses how emerging Internet standards and Web services can be used to alleviate data/application integration problems.