What is CRM?

CRM is more than just keeping track of your customers

You may have been utilising a contact management system for some time, or just using spreadsheets to manage your customers. Unfortunately neither of these are capable of providing the underlying needs of today’s fast moving businesses.

Customer Relationship Management systems (CRM) extend the basic functionality beyond pure contacts and schedules found in most contact management solutions. CRM should be able to track all of the functional areas of your business; creating and running marketing campaigns, leads and opportunity management, quotation production through to sales order processing and contract management. When implemented well, CRM will deliver real tangible benefits to your business by helping you reduce administration time, drive business process, and increase customer-facing activities.

How will it help me?

• Sales Force Automation.
• Marketing.
• Customer Order Management.
• Customer Service.
• Company Management.

Each of these areas will benefit from a greater insight into what is going on - leading to faster and better decisions being made which in turn increases productivity and more importantly, profitability.

If you are looking to implement a CRM solution then a good first step is to look at our white paper "What is an effective CRM solution?" here.