'Product Community: Strengthening Bond with Customers'

Abstract

This paper is a step towards understanding the meaning of customer relationship management and the new wave of relationship building with the customers. Selling a product is no more about creating a good product only. It is now more about creating a sense of belongingness towards the product so that no matter how many new products are introduced in the market, still your customers do not switch their loyalty towards them. Here comes creating a long lasting relationship with the customers so that they keep buying your product. Now let us understand the meaning of CRM. Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to a philosophy and a set of strategies, programs, and systems that focuses on identifying and building loyalty with a retailer’s most valued customers. It aims at creating customer for life and tries to secure a share of mind and wallet of the customer thereby creating market share for the retailer. As a result CRM creates a base of loyal customers who patronize the product, manufacturer or a retailer frequently. Its’ main focus is on people and not on products and services. Now it has largely become technology driven because of large customer base and the facilities that computers provide. So with regards to this we can say that CRM is a process of collecting information about the customers and aligning and remodeling organization’s strategy to meet customer’s demand. It is sometimes also referred to as Relationship Marketing which is define as an “ongoing process of engaging in co-operative and collaborative activities and programmes with immediate and end user customers, to create or enhance mutual economic value at a reduced cost” as defined by Jagdish Seth and Parvatiyar.