CRM - Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was originally a business approach putting the customer at the centre of everything a business does. In recent years it has become a term to describe IT applications to manage sales, marketing and service. CRM is at base level a database of every contact your business has with every customer whether a meeting, phone call, order or web visit. From this businesses can grow their knowledge of their customers and use for targeted marketing to their specific needs and to identify new customers growing turnover and profits.

CRM functions sit mainly in the Marketing, Sales and Service areas of a business and include:

• Sales: generation, qualification and management of leads and prospects; creating and tracking proposals and quotes; out of office (mobile and wireless) support for sales staff; sales pipeline management
• Marketing: Campaign management, event management, list management and database marketing; market segmentation; product launches
• Support: help desk, web self-service, managing customer contact (phone, web, email face to face), problem resolution
• Analysis: customer profitability; campaign effectiveness;

• manage new leads through to (hopefully) an order
• manage a campaign based on a purchased database of possible customers
• integration with an ecommerce website to manage sales and build a history of customer purchasing
• manage an order (on or off line) through to an invoice
• allow sales staff to keep up to date when on the road