A Customer Relationship Management System or CRM allows you to track all of your interactions with customers in one place which provides a single 360-degree view of your customer, from sales, to service and support.
Contact Management
A CRM system provides a central place to store all of your contact information about your customers. Usually split into Accounts and Contacts you can store postal and email addresses as well as phone and mobile numbers in a single convenient place that the whole company can reference. You can choose who has access to which information and most systems allow you to customise the information that you store about each company or contact.
Marketing
CRM systems provide mechanisms to allow you to send targeted marketing messages to your customers. For example, if a customer has recently purchased a bike, then chances are they would be interested in your bike service or accessories, whereas a customer who has brought car spares may be interested in your free winter service check. Based on information captured in the Contact Management and Opportunity Management areas of the CRM system you can build and execute complex marketing campaign strategies including automated email, phone calls and even post-based materials. All co-ordinated within a single system.
Opportunity Management
Once a customer has received your marketing materials they may wish to get further information on a product/service that you offer. This is where opportunity management allows you to track sales enquiries (or opportunities to sell) so that you never loose track of another sale. Using a combination of sales pipeline stages and estimated sales revenue then you can visualise your sales pipeline and place an expect value on future business as you become more likely to win the business.
Service Management
Once your customer has purchased your product or service then you can use the Service Management as a single case management system. Here you can track future requests that come from customers and also this can feed back into the contact and marketing management. For example a customer that rings a software company regularly for support may require additional training on the software (a new opportunity is then created).