Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales related activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer service. ^[1]

According to Forrester Research, spending on customer relationship management is expected to top $11 billion annually by 2010, as enterprises seek to grow top-line revenues, improve the customer experience, and boost the productivity of customer-facing staff.^[2]

Once simply a label for a category of software tools, customer relationship management has matured and broadened as a concept over the years; today, it generally denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all customer-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work in synergy to develop and strengthen relationships, increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.^[3]