CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to practices, strategies, and software that organizations use to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. The goal is to improve customer service relationships, assist in customer retention, and drive sales growth by providing a unified view of each customer and a coordinated approach across sales, marketing, and support teams.

CRM software centralizes information about contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities, and cases in a shared database. It supports operational functions such as sales force automation, marketing automation, and service desk management; analytical CRM uses data analysis to uncover insights about customer behavior and preferences; and collaborative CRM emphasizes knowledge sharing among departments. Typical features include contact and account management, lead and opportunity tracking, workflow automation, email integration, case management, knowledge bases, dashboards, and forecasting. Systems ingest data from multiple channels, including email, phone, web forms, social media, and help desks, and can be deployed on premises or via cloud-based software as a service (SaaS).

CRM implementation requires alignment with business processes and attention to data quality and governance. Integrations with enterprise resource planning (ERP), e-commerce, and marketing platforms are common to provide a seamless customer view. Security, privacy, and access controls are important considerations, along with user training and change management to achieve user adoption. While the term can describe a philosophy of customer-centric management, in practice it usually refers to software platforms that enable organizations to manage interactions more efficiently and gain actionable insights.