Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a concept that organizations, especially (but not only) corporations, have an obligation to consider the interests of customers, employees, shareholders, communities, and ecological considerations in all aspects of their operations. This obligation is seen to extend beyond their statutory obligation to comply with legislation.

Corporate Social Responsibility

CSR is closely linked with the principles of Sustainable Development, which argues that enterprises should make decisions based not only on financial factors such as profits or dividends, but also based on the immediate and long-term social and environmental consequences of their activities.

Many advocates would distinguish CSR from charitable donations and "good works" (i.e., philanthropy)

Corporations have often, in the past, spent money on community projects, the endowment of scholarships, and the establishment of foundations.

They have also often encouraged their employees to volunteer to take part in community work and thereby create goodwill in the community, which will directly enhance the reputation of the company and strengthen its brand.

CSR goes beyond charity and requires that a responsible company take into full account its impact on all stakeholders and on the environment when making decisions.

This requires the company to balance the needs of all stakeholders with its need to make a profit and reward shareholders adequately.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer information.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the process of managing detailed information about individual customers and carefully managing all customer “touch points” to maximise customer loyalty.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables companies to provide excellent real time customer service thru’ effective use of individual account information.

Aspects of CRM

There are three aspects of CRM which can each be implemented in isolation from each other:

Operational CRM- automation or support of customer processes that include a company’s sales or service representative. Collaborative CRM- direct communication with customers that does not include a company’s sales or service representative (“self service”). Analytical CRM- analysis of customer data for a broad range of purposes.

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service.

Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.

One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact “channels” in a company over time without having to repeat the history of their interaction each time.

Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call centre agents.

Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers. This can include a variety of channels, such as internet, email, automated phone (Automated Voice Response AVR).

The objectives of Collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements.

Analytical CRM analyses customer data for a variety of purposes including design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimise marketing effectiveness

design and execution of specific customer campaigns, analysis of customer behaviour to aid product and service decision making (e.g. pricing, new product development etc.)

management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis

prediction of the probability of customer defection (churn).

Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of predictive analytics.