Over time Contact Management applications have evolved into more advanced systems that track, and manage all aspects of customer interaction across the sales, marketing and service/support departments.

One popular definition of CRM is the following:

“CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer loyalty. 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.”

Source: What is CRM?, destination CRM, Thursday, February 21, 2002

Thus, the so-called “holy grail” of CRM is a “single view of all customer-related information”. That is, a CRM application should record all relevant information about a contacts and/or companies, both existing and prospective customers, at all stages of the dealings with that contacts/companies. This “relevant information” should include recording/presenting sales/purchase data for each client through integration with the company’s accounting system.

Typically then a CRM system will have functionality embracing the following core areas:

a)         Sales: Opportunity Management, Sales Methodologies and Account Management Planning.

b)         Marketing: Direct Mailing/Marketing, Campaign Planning, Event Management and Customer Surveys.

c)         Support: Asset Tracking, Service Contracts, Incident Management and Issue Tracking.

Note that these advanced CRM systems still have contact management functionality as the core component. One needs to have a mechanism in place to record and track the basic customer/prospect touch points before one can realistically expect to successfully implement an advanced CRM system.