What is CRM?
CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability.

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 know how 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!

Who benefits from CRM?
Everyone benefits from CRM – Customers, Organisations and their Employees.
Any department within a company, no matter what industry your business is, can benefit from CRM; sales, marketing, customer service, logistics, finance, human resources, technical etc.

The challenge
Getting CRM right isn’t easy. Customer Relationship management requires a focus and commitment by business in order to become a value centre. CRM can not be seen as a mere technology investment which is purchased, deployed and then delivers value in itself. Instead, CRM is a concept that must be realised within the organisation and with the support of its staff.

For full effectiveness, CRM must be seen as an ongoing goal in order to stay in line with business objectives and be able to change with the enterprise. Once an understanding has been gained of this process and decisions have been made surrounding the required changes, then only is it possible to look at how software can be used in achieving the goals of CRM.

Because the changes might have potentially large consequences, it is often beneficial to implement these in digestible chunks, rather than seeking to rapidly change everything. Rapid change can cause problems, especially in terms of internal acceptance.

The key to successful CRM
CRM is a methodology and in order to be successful, it requires several elements to be aligned within the business. This includes both the attitudes of customer-facing members of staff and their back-office colleagues. Customers must also be kept front-of-mind at all times.

If CRM is realised in methodology, practice and technology, it is able to go beyond merely managing customer relationship and deliver reflexive benefit to all areas of business.

Bringing value from CRM to business means incorporating people, process and technology in an effective strategy that describes the ongoing goal of managing relationships in the interest of business. It must deal with the enablement of process and business intelligence with continuous reporting so that adaptive enhancements can be made, as required.

People respond positively to change as a slow process. An understanding of a solution must first be gained before individuals will take ownership of that solution – this is a vital step if it is to become an effective solution.