MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Importance of Interpersonal Relationship

Importance of Interpersonal Relationship

Introduction

Customer relationship management and Interpersonal relationship management in general is hot topics for managers and academics alike. This paper focuses on assessing the impact of CRM. Many organizations have embraced relationship management and its focus on customer lifetime value.

Interpersonal Relationship management is a good conversation through which a potential customer is drawn to the firm through a series of progressively more fulfilling back-and-forth interactions. Following the conversation analogy, there are two distinct stages in the process: striking up the conversation for the first time (acquiring a new customer) and sustaining the conversation (retaining the customer).

Interpersonal Relationship management shifts the manager's focus from the one-time act of acquiring new customers to the comprehensive process of acquiring and retaining customers by developing relationships. The ultimate goal of relationship marketing is to initiate relationships with potentially high-value customers and convert them into customers committed to the firm. Committed customers should then exist in relatively low-maintenance relationships.

Customer relationship management is a very important tool for any company to maintain a good and profitable relationship with its customers. Good and well-planned customer relationship management can many implications for a company, customer relationship marketing can have an impact on customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer service. These things can make a positive impact on the profitability of a company.

Customer Relationship Management

The study of marketing and its practice has undergone an orientation shift from transactional to the relationship in recent years. Traditional studies in marketing focused on the single, isolated exchange between buyer and seller rather than focusing on the extended series of exchanges. Relationship marketing concentrates attention on the whole of the customer's interaction with the firm rather than the single isolated transaction. The fundamental theme of relationship marketing is that establishing and maintaining a long-term relationship between customer and firm leads to greater firm profitability and customer loyalty.

There are five different strategy components for customer relationship management, i.e. development of the essence of the service around which the marketer can build the relationship with the customer, tailoring the association with every different customer, increasing the essence of service with superfluous benefits for the customer, determining a price that would promote loyalty amongst customers, and employing internal marketing strategies.

Targeting and attracting the "right" customer from day one and adding value to the customer relationship throughout the customer's lifetime are the keys to a successful relationship marketing implementation.

Interpersonal relationship strategy continuum ranges from transaction marketing to relationship marketing. On the short-term end of the continuum, transactional marketing is focused on getting customers to make a single transaction with the firm with little opportunity to create repeat purchase behavior. Relationship marketing occupies the opposite end of the continuum, with a long-term orientation and the dual goal getting and keeping customers. Firms adopting a relationship marketing strategy must first focus on acquiring customers with a disposition favorable for developing a long-term relationship then provide customers with service and benefits appropriate for supporting such relationships (Mark 2000, ...