CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends. CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers.

A crm system is usually made up of sales, marketing and customer care modules.

Sales Force Automation

• Contact management
  Contact management software stores, tracks and manages contacts, leads of an enterprise.
• Lead management
  Enterprise Lead management software enables an organization to manage, track and forecast sales leads. Also helps  understand and improve conversion rates.

Marketing Services

• Target list
  Easy target list setup to produce the niche targets that marketing campaigns require
• Easy mailmerge and eshot tools  
  

Customer Service

• Follow up
  Easily Followup with customers to gain feedback /
• Case tracking
  

Finance, ERP and Business Intelligence applications can usually be integrated into the higher end CRM systems.

Network or Web based CRM

• Network based
  There is a move away from network based CRM systems - as synchronisation to a device is required if a user goes off site
• Web Based
  A large number of CRM systems are now web-based - access usually through a browser. This gives the user live data when they are away from the office (this will require 3G / internet connection.