1. CRM Customer Relationship Management

2. What is CRM? CRM is a comprehensive way to manage the relationship with your customers CRM systems enable you to capture information surrounding customer interactions and integrate it with every customer-related function and data point. CRM brings together lots of pieces of information about customers and market trends so you can sell and market your products and services more effectively

3. What does CRM achieve? providing services and products that are exactly what your customers want offering better customer service cross selling products more effectively helping sales staff close deals faster retaining existing customers and discovering new ones

4. How? Sales Force Automation: immediate insight into customer buying patterns; helps managers better forecast future sales; adjust production cycles based on real-time sales figures; enables accurate assessment of the sales team’s performance. Marketing: better manage and design campaigns, adjust budgets, link revenue to specific advertising initiatives, create targeted campaigns, and assess campaign results.

5. How? Service and Support: Enables businesses to provide prompt customer service, accurate product support, call-center service and proactive IT help-desk assistance. Analytics: Generates real-time, graphical and customized reports so that businesses can better allocate resources, gain strategic insights and optimize enterprise performance.

6. CRM Facts CRM market nearly $74 billion in sales in 2007 (Forrester Research). Key vendors include Amdocs, PeopleSoft, Salesforce.com and Siebel Systems More than 80 percent of companies that outsourced CRM achieved a positive ROI.

7. Hosted versus On-premise CRM Hosted CRM (also known as ‘on-demand CRM’) entails a company outsourcing a portion or all of its CRM functions to an ASP (application service provider). On-premise CRM are software systems residing within the company

8. Hosted versus On-premise CRM Unlike licensed on-premise CRM software, hosted CRM tools are payable on a monthly basis without requiring complex implementations or the assistance of an in-house IT team. The result is a cost-effective solution that promises to deliver a quick ROI. On-premise CRM solutions can be tailored to the particular needs of an organization whereas Hosted solutions don’t allow for the same degree of customization. On-premise solutions are easier to integrate into a company’s existing business processes and applications. Some companies with particularly sensitive customer data, such as those in financial services and health care, may not want to relinquish control of their data to a hosted third party