Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is growing in importance due to the challenging business environment faced by organizations throughout the world today. If customer relationships are the heart of business success, then CRM is the valve the pumps a company's life blood. As such, CRM is best suited to help businesses use people, processes, and technology to gain insight into the behaviour and value of customers. This insight allows for improved

customer service, increased call centre efficiency, added cross-sell and up sell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs, and increased share of customer and overall profitability.

What Is CRM?

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and up selling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics.