Running a Business from Home | Home Business Magazine

A type of application that often pulls much of its data from the organization’s data warehouse is customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM system attempts to provide an integrated approach to all aspects of interaction a company has with its customers, including marketing, sales, and support. The goal of a CRM system is to use technology to forge a strong relationship between a business and its customers. To look at CRM in another way, the business is seeking to better manage its own enterprise around customer behaviors.

A variety of software packages have been created to manage customer relationships, most based on capturing, updating, and utilizing extensive profiles of individual customers. These profiles are often stored in a data warehouse, and data mining is used to extract relevant information about the firm’s customers. Furthermore, customer profiles are made available online to all those in the company who might interact with a customer. In addition, Web-based frontends have been created so that a customer can interact with the company online to obtain information about products and services offered by the company, to place an order, to check on the status of an existing order, to seek answers from a knowledge base, or to request service.

CRM software packages enable organizations to market to, sell to, and service customers across multiple channels, including the Web, call centers, field representatives, business partners, and retail and dealer networks.

The capabilities of CRM tools can further be increased by hosting it on our own hosted platform or by getting service with any application hosting provider. Hosted CRM helps us to have access from anywhere and anytime, that ultimately becomes very productive if we have frequently traveling employees. CRM hosting also works perfectly with a business that is spreaded in the form of many branches located at different physical locations. If we host our CRM using by any service provider, we get unlimited free technical support. Hosting provider also takes care of different IT aspects like: daily data backup, security, updates, installation and uninstallation, upgrades and technical supports.

Hosting providers use cloud computing to deliver hosted CRM software. Cloud computing increases the performance to have a fast infrastructure resources. Cloud based CRMs are even cheaper than the locally setup CRM tools. We can further derive our hosted CRM platform setup to host our other software or associated tools. This way, we can get a combined setup for our entire office needs and that is accessible from anywhere and using any device like: PC, MAC, notebook and smartphones.