What is "Customer Relation Management" (CRM)?

CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. CRM entails all aspects of interaction that a company has with its customer, whether it is sales or service-related. CRM is often thought of as a business strategy that enables businesses to:

• Understand the customer
• Retain customers through better customer experience
• Attract new customer
• Win new clients and contracts Increase profitably
• Decrease customer management costs

While the phrase customer relationship management is most commonly used to describe a business-customer relationship, however CRM systems are used in the same way to manage business contacts, clients, contract wins and sales leads. Essentially, CRM aims to put your customers at the centre of the information

flow of your company. 

 The company or organisation is very rich in information about customers. It knows lots about them. But the information is not shared. It’s only available to specific job functions.  CRM solutions provide you with the customer business data to help you provide services or products that your customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and understand who the customer is.

So we can also define it as
 "CRM is the business strategy, process, culture and technology that enables organizations to optimize revenue and increase value through a more complete understanding and fulfillment of customer needs." 

Usually an organization consists of various departments which predominantly have access to customer’s information either directly or indirectly. A CRM system piles up this information centrally, examines it and then makes it addressable within all the departments. Lets take an example of an international call center which uses a CRM tool called ‘xyz’ and is integrated with a phone and a computer system or laptop. Now this system automatically perceives which customer is calling. Before the executive attends the phone the CRM system brings forth the customer details on the computer or laptop screen and also indicates what the opportunity of deals is with that particular customer, what the customer had already purchased or ordered in past and what is the probability of buying in future. Not only this, it can also highlight what all products best suit this customer. For finance department it may show the information regarding the current balance and for accounting department it may pop out the information regarding the recent purchases by the customer. All these pieces of data are stored in the CRM database and are available as and when it is needed. According to this example, CRM system provides a well defined platform for all business units to interact with their clients and fulfill all their needs and demands very effectively and to build long-term relationship.

In a customer focused company, the information flow and the ability to access information is very different:

CRM is an application that enables companies to make the move towards being a customer-centered organisation by putting the customer at the center of all the information that relates to them and allowing authorized people within the organisation to access the information. 

In a customer-centered organisation, salespeople and other employee would have access to all the information that affects their relationship with their customer. Because salespeople are often the "face" of the company, they have an important role in any CRM program The conversations, the emails, the complaints, the complaint resolutions, all the information that had been sent to the customer, who else in the company the customer had spoken to …… everything that affects their ability to service the customer and sell more product or services to them.

Customers of a customer-centered organisation feel more valued. Their requests are dealt with more rapidly and accurately because all the information required to service the request is in one place.

Customer Relationship Management is a complex and difficult way of doing business. Much as some would like us to believe, CRM is not just about installing software or automating customer touchpoints. It is about the reinvention of your enterprise around the customer. It is about becoming and remaining customer-centric. 

Just click on the link to find out "Benefits of implementing CRM solutions!" 
And further "Issues of Fundamental Importance to the Success of CRM application" 

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