Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broad term that covers concepts used by companies to manage their relationships with customers, including the capture, storage and analysis of customer, vendor, partner, and internal process information

Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, including sales, marketing and service. Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's contact history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database when necessary.
One of the main benefits of this contact history is that customers can interact with different people or different contact channels in a company over time without having to describe the history of their interaction each time.
Consequently, many call centers use some kind of CRM software to support their call center agents.
Operational CRM process customer data for a variety of purposes:
Managing Campaigns
Enterprise Marketing Automation
Sales Force Automation

Collaborative CRM covers the direct interaction with customers, for a variety of different purposes, including feedback and issue-reporting. Interaction can be through a variety of channels, such as web pages, email, automated phone (Automated Voice Response AVR) or SMS.
The objectives of collaborative CRM can be broad, including cost reduction and service improvements.

Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:
Design and execution of targeted marketing campaigns to optimize marketing effectiveness
Design and execution of specific customer campaigns, including customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling, retention
Analysis of customer behavior to aid product and service decision making (e.g. pricing, new product development etc.)
Management decisions, e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis
Prediction of the probability of customer defection (churn analysis).
Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of data mining