CRM is a business philosophy involving identifying, understanding and better providing for your customers while building a relationship with each customer to improve customer satisfaction and maximise profits. It's about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers' needs.

To manage the relationship with the customer a business needs to collect the right information about its customers and organise that information for proper analysis and action. It needs to keep that information up-to-date, make it accessible to employees, and provide
the know how for employees to convert that data into products better matched to customers' needs.

The secret to an effective CRM package is not just in what data is collected but in the organising and interpretation of that data. That's where computers come in handy (apart from the Solitaire you can play on them :-)) Computers can't, of course, transform the
relationship you have with your customer. That does take a cross-department, top to bottom, corporate desire to build better
relationships. But computers and a good computer based CRM solution, can increase sales by as much as 40-50% - as some studies have shown.