What is a Customer Relations Manager (CRM)?

"A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship." - - SalesForce

First, a CRM is tool to consolidate all communication with your customer in one spot. Phone calls, Texts, Emails, Appointments, Agreements are all tied to the customer record, and easily acccessed whenever you call, email or meet with a customer. Commonly a Customer Service CRM contacts list also includes Vendors, Networking Contacts, and Personal Information that needs tracking.

Second, a CRM is a schedule. Who do you need to contact today, and what do you need to do with them. Having a schedule makes it a joy to handle 5 or more meetings a day, because you have at your fingertips the information for the meeting. Whether the meeting is by video call, telephone or in-person, you can review notes before the meeting so that youa are completely focused on your client. After the meeting, a CRM makes it simple to add follow up tasks, events and calls so your customer feels you are giving the right attention to their needs.

Third, CRM is task centered - what tasks need doing, and how important are they. Tasks can bury us! When they do, task lists are ignored. Stephen Covey launched a billion dollar industry with his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Task management systems can be involved, or can be simple. A good task list helps you break through the clutter and track what needs to be done.

Does CRM mean "Cloud"? Absolutely not! No aspect of Customer Relations Management requires outside storage. Local data means faster performance and offline access. Local storage gives you the security of knowing that your competitors cannot mine your database.