In an increasingly competitive environment where product differentiation is more and more difficult to attain, companies are training their efforts upon service differentiation. Under this approach business strategy focuses on the customer and the establishment of information system-based processes.

The large information systems used by organisations have traditionally been geared to transaction handling and record-keeping, but not to exploiting this information or the underlying knowledge commercially.

Information environments, data warehouses and marketing are the new systems designed to handle the processes involved in CRM or customer relationship management. The systems supporting the many channels for contacting customers, in turn - customer support centres, e-commerce and m-commerce platforms, sales forces, commercial offices - are the principal players in the evolution of information systems towards new commercial management processes.

With transactional and information-geared systems as the point of departure, on the one hand, a series of actions will be undertaken to gather information on (existing and potential) customers, and on the other, this information will be processed to obtain the knowledge with which to define suitable commercial strategies. New customer relationship management systems will be used to implement these strategies through multiple channels, closing the circle and ensuring constant feedback.

The CRM -Customer Relationship Management- concept, therefore, enlists all of an organisation's resources to put its full capacity behind each customer contact, combining "knowledge" and "skill". The aim of all this is to understand, anticipate and respond to customers' needs, to convert simple transactions into milestones in the relationship process.

The CRM products that have arisen in this context are characterised by the following:

· They are designed as tools to support the entire cycle (marketing, sales, customer support, after-sales service).

· They support the integrated management of contacts made over different channels and facilitate the incorporation of new channels.

· They provide the professionals involved in contact management with an overview of the situation between the customer and the organisation at the time contact is made. This view will always be the same regardless of the channel used or the reason for the contact.

· They decapitalise the ownership of information at both the departmental and personal levels, minimising the impact of staff changes and turnover and enhancing synergies due to the availability of the information across the entire organisation.

· They call for the establishment of mechanisms for integration with data warehouse, data mining and marketing systems, as well as with other corporate transactional systems, providing all the available information on the customer in an integrated fashion.

· They include drivers for the creation, follow-through and control of work flows to ensure that commitments are met.

The main advantage of having this type of products is the potential they afford for shortening implementation times, minimising customised development and replacing much of such development with parameterisation. Moreover, they incorporate the solution to the multi-channel problem and simplify integration with other systems by means of connectors already in place or through EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) solutions. They may, perhaps presumptuously, be referred to as business operating systems.

Nonetheless, when a CRM system is to be implemented in an organisation, certain questions should be taken into consideration to guarantee the success of the project:

· The CRM system is a strategic project that seeks to place the organisation's full competitive capacity in play, and may affect its very survival. Consequently, it calls for total involvement on the part of the entire company.

· Despite the fact that the concept encompasses the full cycle, strategies can be designed to implement the CRM system in successive cycles, to accommodate considerations such as the investment required, ROI, opportunity costs, productivity increases, development and implementation complexities and ease of user assimilation.

· Careful attention should be paid to the design of communication and training plans intended for system users so they perceive not only the benefits that the system affords the company, but those that impact the performance of their own professional duties as well.

This increasingly global and liberalised environment offers at the same time advantages, such as being able to draw from the resources deployed to implement CRM systems. However, the method used to implement such systems will often be defined by factors that guarantee competitive advantage.

The organisation's direct and intense involvement in and commitment to something so strategic is, then, indispensable, as mentioned above. Because, ultimately, when companies use similar business operating systems, competitive value lies in their ability to optimise the capacities and functionalities afforded by such tools.