Customer Relationship management is a process used by companies to track and organize their contacts with existing and prospective customers. CRM software supports these processes. With this software, information about customers and customer interactions can be tracked, stored and accessed by employees in different departments of a company. CRM aims to improve services provided to customers, and to use customer contact information for targeted marketing.

Though the CRM specifically refers to the software based approach, but companies are nowadays stressing the need to adopt a holistic approach to handle costumer relationship. Customer Relationship management can also be implemented sans major investment in software, but software often assumes a lot of significance to achieve the set targets of Customer Relationship Management.

There are several different approaches to CRM. Some of them are customer servicing, Campaign management, and Sales Force Automation. Out of these Sales Force Automation is the most important. It involves scheduling sales calls or mailings; tracking responses; generating reports; opportunity management and assessment; account management and target account selling; and automated sales order processing.

Whilst the functions of campaign management include targeting groups formed from the client base according to a specific criteria; sending campaign-related material to selected recipients using e-mail, telephone, SMS or post; and tracking, storing, and analyzing campaign statistics, including tracking responses and analyzing trends.

CRM is a combination of the policies, processes, and the strategies implemented by an organization to unify its customer interactions. It uses technology to attract new and profitable customers, while forming tighter bonds with existing ones.

Paul Benjamin is a freelance writer on ecommerce. He has written articles and blogs on eCommerce solutions, CRM applications and Inventory management.