What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy that aims to better understand an organisation’s customers through their interactions and the journey they have been on throughout their lifecycle.

This is usually managed using a CRM solution or software such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP or Siebel to help collect, manage and collate information about individuals. These CRM solutions can also help in other ways such as:

• Compiling customer information from across multiple channels such as telephone, email and social media as well as buying history and personal information.
• Marketing automation to help with targeted marketing campaigns.
• Integrations that can help profile or validate the data on a live/regular basis.

Using a CRM solution correctly (with accurate data) can help improve business performance by:

• Helping to retain current customers with personalised customer service due to the customer facing employee having all their profile and activity information available.
• Drive potential customers through the sales process with a more tailored journey.

These benefits tend to be found when the CRM solution is being used to effectively create a single customer view of each individual.

As mentioned before, CRM solutions help to collect and collate personal information about your customers as well as their activity history. Therefore, they are a good place to integrate contact data validation solutions so you can ensure any data that enters this central hub of customer data is both complete and accurate. This allows you to drive high-quality interactions with the individuals you deal with.