CRM - out of professional slang 
"CRM"...If you don't know this "informational slang", there is a risk for you to miss the newest trend of business development and customer service. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is one of the rapidly growing areas in both fields-"professional slang" and "real world" we all live in.  
But what is CRM and why is it in the spotlight  now? CRM (Customer Relationship Management) concept is not new. From the very dawn of trade business, companies contact customers. Focus has always been converged on selling, but not on keeping customers. 

Strong competition, urged by globalization and Internet, changed whole range of business relationships. Today customers have wide choice. They become more informed and more fastidious. Control over the market passed to the customers. In such situation most companies understand they should treat their customers with respect. Companies desperately try to find different ways for effective customer management, not only to attract new clients, but also to keep the current ones. According to a recent Harvard research on business some companies may raise their profit by 100%, by keeping only 5% of their current clients.
Raising competition and diminishing of customer loyalty led to CRM (Customer Relationship Management) idea, where the concept is focused on customer care and cultivation of customer relationships. Aiming at building long-term relationships , CRM includes management of "clustomer knowledge", i.e. "knowledge "from", "about" and "for" clients. In CRM technologies, a lot of databases and "data-mining" techniques are skillfully combined, enabling companies to target clients precisely, and to aprehend what kind of products, services and value do the customers want. Using trade power automation and opportunities for multi-channel distribution, CRM broadened its potential and included overall marketing initiatives, "1 to 1" marketing, diversification of customer experience, strengthening the trade mark position and even everyday customer service. CRM requires good balance of business initiatives - like e-business, sales force effectiveness, customer' service, customer relations planning, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and SCM (Supply Chain Management) - with affordable for the customer prices of products and services. The latest information technologies make this balance possible, but it is not only technology that ensures the balance. First of all CRM is a business initiative.

CRM technologies
First and foremost, CRM success holds on the work of people, processes and clear business objectives and afterwards-on the technology used. Certainly, it is very important to have the right technology to support processes and operations. Companies which use CRM technology, harness it in a lot of activities, bringing obvious results and revenue. Some of them start CRM initiatives by ensuring a clients database with detailed information. This data is automatically put in every client's  record , thus the entire  clustomer information is unified and well organized. Different company teams use this information for segmentation, customer targeting  and supply. What are the tangible advantages of CRM...and what exactly do they mean to the customers? The easiest way to answer this question is by giving an example about how CRM technologies are used in a certain company.Following example is about a customer, calling his/her customer service company. The client is handled by an employee, who knows his/her account and state of service, at the very moment the phone rings. This happens as CRM software identifies calling client and automatically delivers the call to the employee, who is the most suitable for this customer according to the database information. The system uses ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) and "skill based routing". The employee can use a specific software to answer clients' questions. CRM business strategy, applied in this case, allows to the customer to dial one number for any kind of service.
Here, the operator starts phone conversation having a basic knowledge about the client calling. The used technologies include: telephony, ACD, central database, intelligent script and connections to existing systems - in this case the billing system. All these technologies are developed and integrated to streamline the service process.

CRM is a necessity to every company , willing to provide high quality service and to keep its clients. Introduction of such technology is a turning point in the development of any company with customer-oriented profile. By installing a high quality CRM product, a company gets to a higher level of customer service and organizational culture. From there on it has a significant advantage, which being supported and constantly developed guarantees  company's  success and greater customer satisfaction.

See also: SRM software