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: Today, relationship management has evolved beyond CRM (customer relationship management) to include employees, suppliers, vendors, agents and members—encompassing the entire chain of stakeholders. It has become critical that these relationships are maintained, organised, assessed and reviewed to ensure seamless operation and flow of information, giving rise to a new outlook— xRM—‘any’ relationship management. Governments can quickly develop citizen facing services using the xRM tools.

Information has begun to play a major role in relationship management. Development of the information systems today has enabled companies to maintain specific databases that contain highly personalised information regarding stakeholders. Access to such a database that contains details listing birthdays, interaction logs, specific needs or other special requests makes it possible to design and provide highly specialised services to stakeholders and objectively index customer satisfaction.

The importance of relationship management is at the higher end of the maturity curve in industries like hospitality, banking and financial services, consulting, insurance, transport, leisure/luxury services, among others, where ameliorating relationships often impacts the company’s image positively and subsequently, the revenues. Industries have begun to feel the need to unify various platforms across which they conduct business to enable these sectors to work seamlessly. Communication needs to be open, efficient and effective in order to ascertain the optimal functioning of all departments.

A case in point can be the travel services sector, where firms like makemytrip.com have managed to differentiate themselves from competition in the online travel agency market through effective relationship management through its use of information systems. A highly personalised booking through a dynamic trip management engine is the platform for the business. This further extends to understanding customer trends like frequent destinations, preferred times and airlines. The partnership with Nokia has enabled travellers to book tickets from their mobile phones-an example of the increasingly specialised services being offered. Yatra.com, another leading player in this space, has further extended this to a loyalty programme which works in conjunction with such programmes of individual airlines. The efficiency of makemytrip.com as well as yatra.com and other competitors can be monitored by different airlines, which can reward the most efficient agents by giving them attractive offers. Agency relationship management (ARM), which covers similar initiatives as part of a comprehensive framework, creates a significant impact for airlines on direct parameters like repeat business and load factors.