Customer Relationship Management

A business strategy to satisfy the customer needs: building relationships with customers by using special interaction systems, processes and procedures. CRM-system is a corporate information system aimed at improving customer services by storing information about the customers and the history of customer relationship, establishing and optimizing business procedures on the basis of the stored information and further evaluation of their efficiency. The CRM main principles include:

• Single information storage, allowing access to all information about all cases of interaction with the customers at any time;
• Synchronized management of numerous interaction channels (organizational procedures which regulate using these systems and information in every company’s unit);
• Continuous analysis of collected information about the clients in order to make appropriate organizational decisions, for instance, prioritizing clients on the basis of their importance for the company.

CRM implies that in any interaction with the customer by any channel, company’s personnel can have access to complete information about all relations with the customer, and decisions are made on the basis of such information; information about the new decision is also stored and is available in all further interactions. Sometimes customer relationship management systems are taken as part of ERP (in wide interpretation of the concept of "enterprise resource management", ERP).