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a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes (principally sales activities, marketing, customer service, and technical support). The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer Relationship Management designs the company business strategy including customer -interface departments as well as other departments.

CRM is a term that is often referred to marketing. However, there is no complete agreement upon a single definition. This is because CRM can be considered from a number of perspectives. In summary, the three perspectives are:

Information Technology (IT) perspective

Business Strategy perspective

从顾客生命周期的角度看--The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) perspective

Whereas our topic is focused on Customer lifecycle, we are going to explain and go deeply inside only in the third perspective.

顾客生命周期--Customer Life Cycle

For a better explanation about the Customer Lifecycle, we want to introduce firstly the concept of a Product Life Cycle: PLC is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal.

Here is the general product lifecycle which normally follows these 5 steps: Research & Development, Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. The graphic (shown in illustration 1 below) shows how the sales change during the PLC.

例证1 产品的生命周期--Ilustration 1. Product Life Cycle

The PLC can also be divided in 5 stages which represent the kind of customers who makes use of the product during the lifecycle: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.

So what is a Customer Lifecycle? Just like a product of a certain company, a company itself has a lifecycle as well. It is simply the behavior of a customer with a company over the time. Customers begin a relationship with a company, and over the time, either decide to continue this relationship, or end it.

The Customer Life Cycle (CLC) has obvious similarities with the Product Life Cycle (PLC). However, CLC focuses upon the creation of and delivery of lifetime value to the customer (looking at the products or services that customers need throughout their lives). It is marketing orientated rather than product orientated, and embodies the marketing concept. Essentially, CLC is a summary of the key stages in a customer's relationship within an organization. The problem is that every organization offer different product, which makes it impossible to draw out a single Life Cycle that is the same for every organization.

The illustration below shows the course of the relationship between customer and supplier:

例证2--Ilustration 2

Due to the graph, there are four phases in a customer lifecycle: exploration, growth, saturation and decline. During the Exploration phase the customer starts to see the promises made during communication for the first time; the level of satisfaction is relatively low, the customer have no experie