Customer Relationship Management Definition:
CRM is an acronym for Customer Relationship Management. Organizations hoping to improve their sales and customer relationships often use customer relationship management tools to better manage these interactions. There are three common classes of customer relationship management products:
- Contact Management
- Sales Force Automation
- Customer Service & Support
Contact Management
Contact Management applications are the most basic of CRM software. Fundamentally they help you store and find contact information, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers. Some contact managers provide additional functions like reporting and enabling several people in a workgroup to access the same database. Some also provide calendar functions.
Sales Force Automation
Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools are the sales side of CRM and therefore are designed to help sales organizations manage their sales processes. Most SFA products have very basic functionality and do little more than help a sales rep organize their sales contacts. However, there is an emerging class of SFA tools that have robust features that help facilitate the entire sales process. These products empower both the front line sales rep as well as sales management. A true SFA tool will help simplify a sales rep's day by taking on many tedious tasks, for example, gathering, categorizing and distributing sales leads. Also, sales management gains the ability to view, forecast and report on the customer relationship management sales pipeline as well as measure the performance of each sales rep.
Customer Service & Support (CSS)
Customer Service & Support (CSS) tools are the support side of CRM and therefore are designed to help facilitate customer interactions with the Help desk or service and support representatives. CSS helps by automating customer incidents originating as service requests, complaints and other types of information requests. A best-of-breed CSS product will allow a customer care representative access to all customer interactions—appointments, tasks, notes, email, inbound and outbound calls—in a single location, and are automatically linked to specific contacts and company details related to a customer service incident. Through quicker incident resolution, an organization is better able to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
The right CRM solution can help you turn potential customers and existing customers into lifelong customers. That's good for your business.