A Study on Customer Relationship Management in Banks DR. P. ANBUOLI 1 , T. R. THIRUVEN KAT RAJ 2 Faculty, Department of Management Studies, Anna University Regional Office Madurai, Madurai, Tamil Assistant Professor, Bharath Niketan Engineering College, Theni, Tamilnadu. Abstract: As economic globalization increases the competition and creates a climate of constant change, winning and keeping customers has never been more important. Nowadays, Banks have realized that customer relationships are a very important factor for their success. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy that can help them to build long-lasting relationships with their customers and increase their revenues and profits. CRM in the banking sector is of greater importance.Traditionally, few people changed their banks unless serious problems occurred during the past days Consumers largely selected their banks based on how convenient the location of bank's branches was to their homes or offices. With the advent of new technologies in the business of bank, such as Internet Banking and ATMs, now customers can freely chose any bank for their transactions. Thus, the customer base of banks has increased, and so has the choices of customers for selecting the banks. Organization of financial institutions were focus on customer centric rather than product centric assumption and reflected in their marketing policies. Marketing operations consist of two activities: acquisition and retention of customers. In the world of mass and target marketing, the focus was on the acquisition side. On the other hand, in the world of relationship marketing, attention shifted to retention. This happened mainly because of the cost involved. In general, it is believed that it is five to 10 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than obtain repeat business from an existing customer. As the needs of customers became diversified, conventional promotions became less efficient and drove up costs. The pressures of competitive and dynamic markets have contributed to the growth of CRM in the Financial Services Sector. Key words: CRM, Bank, Customer Introduction Customer relationship management (CRM) is a management strategy that unites information technology with marketing. It originated in the United States in the late 1990’s, and, to date, has been accepted in a significant number of companies worldwide. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends. CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. We can view CRM as an integrated system of web enabled software tools and databases accomplishing a variety of customer-focused business processes that support the three phases of the relationship between a business and its customer. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy to acquire and manage the most valuable customer relationships. CRM requires a customer-centric business philosophy and culture to support effective marketing, sales and service processes. CRM applications can enable effective customer relationship management, provided that an enterprise has the right leadership, strategy and culture. Proceedings of The Intl. Conf. on Information, Engineering, Management and Security 2014 [ICIEMS 2014] 30 ICIEMS 2014 ISBN : 978-81-925233-3-0 www.edlib.asdf.res.in / www.iciems.in Downloaded from www.edlib.asdf.res.in