E-CRM – Crucial Element in Banking Sector

The banking sector is considered as dynamic sector. The main aim of the banks is to increase customer profitability. Banks are aiming to increase customer profitability by providing valuable services to the customers. Decade ago, before the technological era, people used to visit weekly market or store in the vicinity to purchase goods. It was easy for the vendor, the store owner to identify the customers by name and he could easily have a glance of the customer's preferences, needs, and wants. Due to these strong relationships between the vendor or the owner and the customer, the customer remained loyal to them. This strong customer and owner relationship slowly began to disappear as the population moved from the traditional way of living to technological era. The customers are now-a-days loaded with information collected through various sources. As a result banks should up-to-date facility and services to meet the changing requirements of the customers. Similarly in banking industry, earlier the banker used to wait in the bank for the customers to walk-in, but today the bankers have to go to the customer for business deals. In short, the activities of a bank should be focused on its existing or acquiring new customers. This can be easily achieved if banks develop a good relationship with the clients. To achieve this goal, banks first need to understand the needs of the customers. They need to provide the services accordingly which will help to strengthen the relationship with the customer. Thus, we can say that customer relationship management means to build a strong relationship with the customers by understanding their needs, wants and accordingly helping them to achieve their needs or wants in a hassle-free way. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an interaction with customers to understand their needs through various source of medium. Customer relationship (CRM) is a customer-oriented, customer centric that enables us to get the responses on the basis of relationships with customers, which help us to improve the level of customer satisfaction. It includes technology which provides various software packages which enable us to form strong relationship between the customer and the organization. E-CRM means building strong and long term relationship with the customers through web or internet. E-CRM helps us to track the various activities of the customers by collecting information from their daily activities these activities can be either online (emails, website) as well as offline (phone, fax) Customer relationship management is based on three basic elements viz. Customer rnRelationship rnManagement Let us now talk about e-CRM techniques used by banks in India. The online services in banks enables organisation in to strengthen relationship with the customers. Following are some of the e-CRM techniques used by banks - Internet Banking, Mobile Banking, Automated Teller Machine (ATM), Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). E-CRM in banks has helped banks to be presently globally and worldwide. They become customer -centric organizations by using the various. Thus in this way with the utilization of various electronic, automated channels helps the banks in maintaining long term relationship with their customers and gets various benefit likes increases sales revenue, improve customer service etc. By making use of technology CRM became more interactive. Some example e-CRM application functions which help to increase customer support, order management are provided by companies such as Siebel Systems, Oracle, etc.