CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and is used quite loosely to refer to three things:
This sloppy use of the term CRM to mean many things can get pretty confusing, and unfortunately few articles and books clearly define the specific meaning they are using, while others use more than one meaning within the same piece. It's a mess! The CRM name and abbreviation were invented specifically to refer to the then-emerging class of tools that automate the customer-contact functions. This book focuses on CRM tools, bringing in discussions of the surrounding processes only as they relate to the success of the tool project itself. However, we will see that there are plenty of opportunities to discuss the larger context since technology by itself cannot make a CRM project successful, regardless of the claims some tool vendors make about it. |