What is CRM?

By Mark Annett.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability. If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve that pumps a company’s life blood.

CRM can brings together information from all data sources within the organisation, as well as from outside if needed, to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer-facing employees, mainly in such areas as sales, marketing and customer service to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics and more.

In short, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business philosophy involving identifying, understanding and better providing for your customers, while building a relationship with each customer to improve customer satisfaction and maximise profits. It’s about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers’ needs.

To manage the relationship with the customer a business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organise that information for proper analysis and action. It needs to keep that information up-to-date, make it accessible to employees, and provide the knowhow for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers’ needs. That’s exactly what CRM can do- all in one single application!