Businesses striving to understand their customers better are increasingly looking to customer-relationship management systems and services. Their choices are broadening as several services companies unveil or expand offerings.

The service uses packaged applications, data warehousing and business-intelligence systems, electronic commerce, and workflow/imaging systems to help companies attract new customers and build greater loyalty among existing ones.

To manage these systems on an outsourced basis, AHC will use performance metrics to determine if a company is using customer-relationship management to its maximum benefit.

IT managers and analysts say customer-relationship management offerings are becoming more important in the effort to retain customers. CRM provides more touch points with our customers, which allows for better customer service.

How does Customer Relationship Management become e-business?

Central to e-business is the concept of customer self-service. Analyzing past customer behavior makes possible an e-business to personalize its offerings and to anticipate customer's wants and needs. Providing quality customer self-service involves Web-enabling and existing back-end systems, and building in secure access policies. These systems will give customers controlled accesses to the data they need, i.e., not only are you managing your relationship with your customers; you're giving your customers the tools to manage their relationship with you.

By using e-business-based CRM solutions, you can:

• Fine tune segmentations
• Improve customer retention through loyalty
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Expand customer mind-share and spend-share
• Demonstrate a competitive advantage
• Increase bottom line

AHC's approach follows a trend of offering end-to-end services, including packaged apps, Web interactions, data warehousing and call centers. This is a "holistic approach," so you must bring together all of those pieces.