Customer Relation Management or also known as CRM refers to the strategies, practices as well as to the technologies that a certain company uses in managing, recording as well as evaluating the interaction of the customers in order to drive the growth of sales by enriching and deepening the relationships with their customers.

Customer Relation Management is used to analyze and manage the interaction of customers as well as the data throughout the lifecycle of the customers. It runs with the goals of business owners on how they will be able to improve their business relationships with its customers, assist the retention of the customers and the growth of the driving sales. CRM systems are specially designed to compile the information with customers across the different channels and points of contact between the company and to its customers. It includes the companies’ telephone, website, direct mail, live chat, social media and its marketing materials. The system used by CRM also give a customer-facing the staff with the detailed information about the customer’s purchase history, personal information, their buying preferences as well as their concerns.

The software used in Customer Relation Management consolidates the information of the customer and their documents into a single form of database so that their business will become easier for them to handle. The other functions that CRM offers also include various interactions for the customers over phone calls, email, social networking sites and other channels which depend on the capability of the system. CRM also automates a variety of workflow process such as calendars, tasks and alerts. They also give the managers the capability to be able to track the performance and the productivity which is based on the information provided in the system. Putting the link of your social networking site in your website is also required by Customer Relation Management in order to attract a lot of sales.

The common features that CRM have include marketing automation, sale force automation, the contact center automation and the location based services or the geolocation technology. CRM also put the onus of control administration, security and maintenance of the information and data base on the company itself. With this kind of approach, the company can purchase licenses instead of buying a subscription yearly. CRM also reside on the servers of the company and the user also assume that the cost of the upgrades usually require a long process of installation in order to fully integrate the data of a certain company. Those companies that have complex CRM might need to benefit more from the deployment of the premises.

The advancement of Customer Relation Management technology, with the right management, can become better more than the glorified database where the bits of information of the customers are stored. Because of the fact that data need to be set and connected, they need to be organized and distributed so that the users can easily and quickly access all the necessary information for fast and effective growth of business.