Customer or Client Relationship Management (CRM) is about managing an organisation’s relationships with its existing and prospective customers.
It’s a strategy to develop a deep understanding of customers’ behaviours and needs to develop strong, sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships.
To achieve this the organisation must be designed around managing customer segments, maximising customer satisfaction and developing end to end customer processes.
As customer knowledge is acquired it must be incorporated into ongoing strategy adjustments and process changes to optimise customer lifetime value and satisfaction.
From a business strategy perspective CRM is concerned with identifying and attracting prospective customers, converting them to paying customers and retaining customers. This roughly corresponds to marketing, sales and service.
Most commonly though, the term CRM is associated with software and related technology to manage customer relationships.