What is CRM?

Elevate customer experiences and grow your business with customer relationship management (CRM)

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, CRM is more important than ever if you want your business to thrive. Keep reading to learn what CRM is and how it can help your company enhance customer interactions, close more sales, and fuel growth.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a set of integrated, data-driven software solutions that allow your company to manage, track, and store information related to your current and potential customers. By keeping this information in a centralized system, business teams have access to the insights they need, the moment they need them.

Without the support of an integrated CRM solution, your company may miss out on growth opportunities and lose potential revenue because you’re not optimizing operating processes or making the most of customer relationships and sales leads.

In the era of AI, CRM systems are more powerful than ever—and the most effective CRM platforms are connected and intelligent. By connecting all your customer data, you’ll have the ability to make data-driven decisions that help strengthen customer relationships and grow your business. By applying intelligence to that data, you can grow even faster and with more precision.

A unified CRM platform gives you the tools you need to automate processes, boost efficiency, and take full advantage of your data with AI-powered insights. This enables you to elevate customer experiences and build loyalty.

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Streamlining customer data

Not too long ago, companies tracked customer-related data with spreadsheets, email, address books, and other siloed, often paper-based CRM solutions. A lack of integration and automation prevented people within and across teams from quickly finding and sharing up-to-date information, slowing their ability to create marketing campaigns, pursue new sales leads, and service customers.

Fast forward to today. In the digital era, CRM systems automatically collect a wealth of information about existing and prospective customers, including email addresses, phone numbers, company websites, social media posts, purchase histories, and service and support tickets. The CRM system then unifies the data and generates consolidated profiles that are shared with appropriate teams.

CRM systems also connect with other business tools, including online chat and document-sharing apps. Plus, these platforms often include built-in business intelligence and AI capabilities that automate administrative tasks and provide actionable insights.

Today’s innovative CRM tools give sales, marketing, commerce, field service, and customer service teams immediate visibility and access to crucial data that helps them develop, improve, and retain customer relationships.

Key features of a CRM

Because CRMs help centralize customer data, these systems make it easier for your team to manage relationships, track progress, and ultimately drive growth. However, these tools do more than just store contact information—they also help you build stronger, more personalized connections with clients.

Here are the key features to look for in a CRM:

Centralized database: All customer information is stored in one place, making it easy to access and update, ensuring everyone on your team is on the same page.
Sales tracking: CRMs help track customer interactions, sales activities, and opportunities, so you can monitor the sales pipeline and forecast revenue more accurately.
Automation: Modern CRM systems help allow your teams to automate routine tasks like follow-up emails or data entry. This saves time, reduces errors, and empowers employees to focus on more important, strategic goals.
Customer segmentation: CRMs allow you to organize customers based on various criteria, such as industry, location, and purchase history. This helps your team send more targeted communications and improve conversion rates.
AI capabilities: Modern CRMs incorporate AI-powered tools to provide insights into customer behavior, predict sales trends, and suggest actions that can improve customer engagement.
Reporting and analytics: CRMs offer detailed reports on sales performance, customer activity, and marketing efforts, helping you make data-driven decisions.

When your company invests in the right CRM solution, you’ll reap the benefits. For example, a CRM platform can help you:

Increase sales. CRM solutions allow you to monitor each opportunity through the sales funnel, track lead-related data, and gain actionable insights. This allows your sales and marketing teams to stay organized, understand where each lead is in the sales process, and know who’s worked on each opportunity.
Get real-time performance data through sales monitoring. Link sales data into your CRM solution to provide an immediate, accurate picture of sales. With a real-time view of your pipeline, you’ll pinpoint any slowdowns and bottlenecks—or if your team won a major deal.
Plan your next steps. Focus on what matters most using AI and built-in intelligence to identify the top priorities and how your team can make the most of their time and efforts. For example, sales teams can identify which leads are ready to hand off and which need follow-up.
Optimize workflows with automation. Build sales quotes, gather customer feedback, and send email campaigns with task automation, which helps streamline marketing, sales, and customer service. This helps eliminate repetitive tasks so your team can focus on higher impact activities.
Track customer interactions for greater impact. CRM solutions include features that tap into customer behavior and surface opportunities for optimization to help you better understand engagement across various customer touchpoints.
Connect across multiple platforms for superior customer engagement. Whether through live chat, calls, email, or social interactions, CRM solutions help you connect with customers where they are, helping build the trust and loyalty that keeps your customers coming back.
Accelerate growth and gain a competitive advantage. A scalable, integrated CRM solution built on a security-rich platform helps meet the ever-changing needs of your business and the marketplace. Quickly launch new marketing, e-commerce, and other initiatives and deliver rapid responses to consumer demands and marketplace conditions.

AI-powered CRM systems take things a step further by offering advanced features like predictive analytics and personalized recommendations. These systems can analyze past customer behaviors, helping you anticipate future actions, and automatically suggest the best next steps for engagement. This means your sales and marketing teams spend less time on manual tasks and more time focusing on building meaningful relationships.

In short, the right CRM system can provide your company with a multitude of benefits, including business growth, a competitive advantage, improved efficiency, and enhanced customer experiences.

Why implement a CRM solution?

As you define your CRM strategy and evaluate customer relationship management solutions, look for one that provides a complete view of each customer relationship. You also need a solution that collects relevant data at every customer touchpoint, analyzes it, and surfaces actionable insights. Learn how to choose the right CRM for your needs in The CRM Buyer’s Guide for Today’s Business.

The right CRM system will help your company:

Identify and engage the right customers. Predictive insight and data-driven buyer behavior helps you learn how to identify, target, and attract the right leads—and then turn them into customers.
Improve customer interaction. With a complete view of the customer, every member of the sales team will know a customer’s history, purchasing patterns, and any specific data that’ll help your team provide the most attentive service to each individual customer.
Track progress across the customer journey. Knowing where a customer is in your overall sales lifecycle helps you target campaigns and opportunities for the highest engagement.
Increase team productivity. Improved visibility and streamlined processes help increase productivity, helping your team focus on what matters most.
Tap into AI for smarter decision making. With AI-powered CRM tools like predictive analytics, you can quickly analyze past customer behaviors, anticipate future actions, and get suggestions for the best next steps for engagement.

How can a CRM help your company?

Companies of all sizes benefit from CRM software. For small businesses looking to grow, CRM helps automate business processes, which frees employees to focus on higher-value activities. For large enterprises, CRM helps simplify and improve even the most complex customer engagements.

For example, see how EPAM Systems Inc. is reimagining sales with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales:

Challenge: EPAM faced inefficiencies with an outdated CRM system, resulting in fragmented sales processes and hampered global collaboration. To address these challenges and support their growth trajectory, they sought a modern solution to streamline operations and enhance productivity.

Solution: EPAM upgraded to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and integrated Microsoft Copilot for Sales, streamlining processes, improving data visibility, and fostering global collaboration. This modern solution supports their growth strategy and promotes a data-driven sales culture.

Impact: The adoption of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot significantly streamlined EPAM's sales processes, promoting greater efficiency and global collaboration. With more than 600 users by the end of 2023, this modern solution is improving sales outcomes, aligning with EPAM's growth strategy and business objectives.

Take a closer look at how a CRM system can benefit your individual business teams:

Marketing teams

With a CRM system, your marketing teams gain the ability to generate multichannel marketing campaigns, nurture sales-ready leads with targeted buyer experiences, and collaborate with planning and real-time tracking tools. This helps them create curated marketing strategies that improve your customers’ journey.

CRM tools also allow marketers to get insights into your company’s brand reputation and market through customized dashboards of data analysis. This allows them to prioritize the leads that matter most to the business and adapt quickly with insights and business decisions fueled by the results of targeted, automated processes.

Sales teams

Empower sellers to engage with customers, truly understand their needs, and close more deals. CRM tools make it easier for your sales team to find the right prospects and customers with targeted strategies and create a successful plan of action for the next step in your pipeline.

By tapping into CRM insights, you can build a smarter selling strategy, allowing your sales team to foster relationships, boost productivity, and accelerate performance. And by using AI capabilities that measure past and present leading indicators, you can track customer relationships from start to finish and automate sales execution with contextual prompts. This allows your company to deliver a personalized experience that aligns with the buyer’s journey anytime, anywhere.

Customer service teams

Provide customers with an effortless, omnichannel experience. With the use of service bots, your customer service teams will have the tools to deliver value and improve engagement with every interaction. Offering personalized services, your agents can upsell or cross-sell using relevant, contextual data.

With a guided, intelligent service supported by all channels, your customers can connect with agents to quickly resolve their issues, resulting in a first-class customer experience.

Field service teams

Empower your agents to create exceptional in-person experiences. By implementing IoT into your operations, you can detect problems faster and automate work orders, schedule, and dispatch technicians in just a few clicks. The right CRM platform also makes it easier to streamline scheduling and inventory management, allowing you to boost onsite efficiency, deliver more personalized service, and reduce costs.

Plus, CRM systems often provide real-time technician location tracking, appointment reminders, quotes, contracts, and scheduling information. This allows customers to stay connected to your field agents—which helps your business build customer trust and loyalty.

Project service automation teams

Improve your profitability with integrated planning tools and analytics that help build your customer-centric delivery model. An effective CRM system gives you a clear view of costs and revenue using robust project planning capabilities and intuitive dashboards. This makes it easier to anticipate demands, determine resources capacity, and forecast project profitability.

And with the ability to measure utilization with real-time dashboards, you can empower your service professionals to apply those insights to their own workflows and optimize resources at any time. This helps your teams simplify processes internally, seamlessly collaborate, and increase productivity.

Explore what’s next for CRM

The future of CRM is evolving rapidly, driven by new technologies that are making systems smarter and more efficient. In particular, AI and predictive analytics are already transforming CRM because these tools help businesses anticipate customer needs and improve decision making.

CRM systems that include AI capabilities can analyze data in real time to offer personalized recommendations and automate tasks. This helps reduce the time you spend on manual processes and allows for more meaningful interactions with customers.

Plus, many businesses are moving beyond just managing customer relationships with predictive analytics. By analyzing past behaviors and trends, these tools can forecast future actions, helping you better understand customer intent and take action to meet their needs. This leads to more relevant outreach and elevated customer experiences.

The transition to cloud-based CRM is also shaping the future of this technology. Moving to the cloud offers flexibility, scalability, and access to real-time data from anywhere. It makes CRM more collaborative and accessible for teams, which ultimately means better customer service and more streamlined operations.

As these technologies evolve, CRM will become an even more powerful tool to help companies better understand and engage customers and build stronger, more lasting relationships.

3 steps to get started with CRM

Whether you're part of a small business or a large company, getting started with CRM is easier than you might think.

Here are three steps to help you begin your CRM journey:

Identify your goals. Are you trying to streamline communication with clients, track sales progress, or improve team collaboration? Defining your priorities will guide you toward the right CRM solution.
Make sure your team is on board. CRM is most effective when everyone across your org—including sales, marketing, and customer service teams—uses it consistently. Training is essential, so set aside time to teach your team how to use the system and show them how it benefits them.
Start with the basics. Begin by inputting your existing customer data, setting up sales pipelines, and automating routine tasks like follow-up emails. As you get more comfortable with the platform, you can build on that foundation with advanced features such as predictive analytics or customer segmentation.

CRM doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With the right system and a clear plan, you’ll quickly see its positive impact on your business.

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Explore CRM products

In simple terms, customer relationship management (CRM) is a set of connected software solutions that help your company manage, track, and store information related to your customers. By keeping this information in a centralized system, business teams have access to the insights they need right when they need them.

The most effective CRM platforms are connected and intelligent. By connecting all your current and prospective customer data, you’ll have the ability to make data-driven decisions that help strengthen customer relationships and grow your business.
CRM is used to collect valuable information about your existing and prospective customers, including email addresses, phone numbers, company websites, social media posts, purchase histories, and service and support tickets. The CRM system unifies this data, generates consolidated profiles, and shares the info with your company’s appropriate teams.

CRM systems also connect with other business tools, including online chat and document-sharing apps. These platforms often include built-in business intelligence and AI capabilities that automate administrative tasks and provide actionable insights.
Additionally, CRM tools give sales, marketing, commerce, field service, and customer service teams immediate visibility and access to crucial data that helps them develop, improve, and retain customer relationships.
An example of CRM is how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps businesses manage customer interactions. With this tool, companies can keep track of everything from sales inquiries to customer support tickets in one unified platform.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, sales teams can access detailed profiles of each customer, including previous purchases, contact history, and service requests. Marketing teams can also segment customers based on interests or behaviors, allowing for more personalized campaigns. Customer service agents can quickly resolve issues by seeing past communications and service histories, ensuring a smoother and faster resolution process.

This allows companies to centralize all their customer data, making it easier for different teams to work together and provide a seamless experience. This not only improves communication internally but also helps businesses build stronger, more meaningful relationships with their clients. As a result, companies can boost customer satisfaction, improve retention, and drive more revenue—all while operating more efficiently.
Customer relationship management (CRM) and Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are both essential tools for business growth, but they serve different purposes. A CRM focuses on managing interactions with customers and prospects. It helps you track sales, marketing efforts, and customer service activities, allowing you to improve customer relationships and drive sales. With a CRM, you can better understand your customers' needs and behaviors, ensuring a more personalized approach to communication and service.

On the other hand, an ERP system integrates core business functions like accounting, inventory, procurement, and human resources into one platform. Its goal is to streamline operations, improve data accuracy, and increase efficiency across departments. An ERP provides a holistic view of your business, helping you manage internal processes and resources more effectively.