An Overview
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Ecommerce Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) have become buzzwords in the business world. This overview is intended to help you quickly analyze how CRM might be profitable for your business.

What is a Definition of Customer Relationship Management?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business strategy to identify, cultivate, and maintain long-term profitable customer relationships. It requires developing a method to select your most profitable customer relationships (or those with the most potential) and working to provide those customers with service that exceeds their expectations.

There are many different facets of CRM for every business:

Identifying qualified leads and gaining new customers

Closing sales more effectively and efficiently

Allowing customers to perform business transactions quickly and easily

Providing service and support following a sale

Why bother at all?
You may wonder if Customer Relationship Management has any value for you right now. You have plenty of work on your plate and you don't need to be lead astray with the latest fad in business management.

However, you need to remember that:

1. Customer Relationship Management is nothing new.
   Since the beginning of time businesses have been focusing more attention on customers with the most potential for profit. Customer Relationship Management is a new name for an old game.
2. Several companies can offer the same products and services you offer. 
   The Internet makes it easier than ever for your customers to shop around. You need to make doing business with your company easy, effective, and enjoyable. You cannot afford to ignore your customer's needs. You need to find a way to design your business to meet and exceed your customers expectations.

Don't Waste Your Money
Before I go into how online CRM tools can help you be more profitable, I need to make the following warning. NEVER spend money on online CRM tools just because they are the latest and greatest technology and they look really cool. It will be a waste of your money to implement web-based CRM tools if they don't fit into your overall business strategy. Make sure you develop a CRM strategy first, and then look at what tools can be helpful to you in implementing that.

How Online CRM Can Make You Money
With that warning in mind, CRM has the potential to make your business very profitable. I can hear your objections now. Yeah, right... but first I have to spend money on setting up these online tools.

This is true. You will have to spend money to setup CRM tools online. However, remember that every question your website answers that doesn't require your staff's time to answer is saving you money. Is there a question that your staff answers 100 times a month? It makes a lot more sense to automate the answering of that question online. You will have to spend some money to set this up, but in the long run it will save you money and keep your customers happy.

This is just one of many potential applications of CRM, but we don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We still need a strategy. If your CRM strategy is created correctly, it should allow your staff to work more efficiently and effectively with your customers, and it will keep your customers happy -- all of which will make your business more profitable.