What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a term first coined in the 1990’s
The literal and original meaning of the expression “Customer Relationship Management” was, simply, managing the relationship with your customer. Today it is used to describe IT systems and software designed to help you manage this relationship.
Like many buzzwords, the term CRM has been adopted by IT system vendors to fit their product. CRM might be used to describe a cloud CRM systems for sales people (Sales Force Automation, Opportunity Management), for marketing people (Marketing Automation, Campaign Management), for Helpdesks (Customer Service and Support), email and voice logging, and so on.
What is CRM? Customer Relationship Management explainedAccording to Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, “the generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve their customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers”. Which is as good a definition as any.
History of CRM
CRM systems were the must-have products at the height of the Internet bubble in 2000/2001. There followed a few years of disillusionment as expensive systems were late and then failed to deliver the results to meet the raised expectations of the users. The Gartner Group, a US firm of analysts, have a Hype Cycle graph showing the traditional pattern of a slow start, followed by unjustified euphoria, down to disillusionment and back to a level of realisable sanity. Which is where we are today, at last.
Here at Really Simple Systems we provide a Cloud CRM system that covers the whole business process from marketing, sales through to customer support.