Idea 14 - Customer relationship management Some ideas continue to command respect among hardened management theorists years after they first appeared, and some provoke snorts of derision. Customer relationship management or CRM - around which an entire industry has been erected - gets more than its fair share of snorts. We all experience CRM, the bad side of it, every time we get stuck in touch-tone hell, with a recorded voice asking us to 'please select one of the following options' - for the fifth time. Yet the underlying idea is perfectly logical- concentrate on your customers, learn about their needs and behaviour, use what you learn to improve the relationship and, ultimately, sell them more of what it is you're selling them. Technology Big firms have used technology to do much of this, to capture and store customer information, to analyse it and to automate their sales and support teams. CRM has become very closely identified with technology as a result...