Interact – An interaction strategy that was thoroughly envisioned allows a company to see each customer as an individual and over time learn their behavior which means when a change occurs staff will be able to quickly respond and when the response is positive it will have a positive impact.

Interactive management gets harder as the customer relationship gets more complex. You deal with outbound channels which may include catalogues, email, mail outs, and telephone calls out. As well you deal with inbound channels which include tracking your customers and responding to them. This occurs whether you have a brick and mortar store or a web store, whether you sell products or service. Communication is key to the success of any business.

Distinguish - When it comes to interaction with your customer there is no one size fits all so you must take the time to distinguish between your customers. You need to be able to group like customers so that you can send them relevant information at any time. You need to be able to tailor different elements of your building to the correct customer base.

When you combine your historical data with your real time data you can do a great job of predicting customer behavior before they ever happen. This gives you the ability to warn sales teams of pending changes to the market. It also makes it easier to establish a successful cross sell program.

Interact - Once you distinguish your clientele you also save money and you do a better job of targeting your market and interacting with the appropriate market. So rather than sending the same communication to everyone you break your customers into groups by distinguishing where they belong. That means the customer also gets better information.

Customize – CRM is a positive way enhance your customer interaction using technology. But the most powerful part of CRM software is the ability to customize it so that it fits your unique business. You can configure it for your own business rules, your modeling, business platform, and a host of other abilities.

The same goes for retrieving that information. With just a click of a mouse you can easily retrieve data in the format you want. Once you customize the software to work with your business you will quickly see the benefits to CRM software.

It's a hi-tech generation which means most of your customers will be very computer savvy and even involved in some degree with customer software in the workplace whether it's a full CRM system or a smaller type database. That means they'll be that much more impressed when you over them top notch CRM software.

So although not everyone agrees with the fundamental pillars most would agree that a good CRM strategy will Identify – Distinguish – Interact – Customize. In fact it's a way to stay ahead of the competition.