Customer relationship management or CRM is a set of business processes and essential applications that helps you or your Dynamics CRM partner manage your customer information, conversations and activities. With CRM, your marketing, sales, and customer service teams can understand each customer and deliver the right answers. By analysing this information, you can develop better decisions to close more deals, reduce service costs, and keep customers satisfied.

CRM Cloud Applications

CRM is moving toward cloud computing with Dynamics 2013. Instead of purchasing and maintaining expensive software and servers to manage customer information and conversations, companies can take advantage of Web-based or “cloud” applications to run their CRM for them and get a high return on their investments. Salesforce.com is an established name in cloud computing, they offer a complete set of CRM cloud apps, a cloud infrastructure, and a cloud platform.

For Sales and Marketing

CRM cloud apps provide sales managers with real-time visibility into their team’s initiatives so they can confidently forecast sales. CRM cloud apps makes managing customer information easier so sales representatives can spend less time handling data and spend more time with customers.

For marketers, it’s really important to track the sales obtained from leads generated by marketing campaigns on your website, with Google AdWords or through e-mail. CRM cloud apps enable marketers to track sources and leads, route these leads to the right salespeople in real-time, and give the analytics to see what’s effective and what needs improvement.

For Customer Service

Customers will have always questions about your products. They might search Google or Twitter for answers and will only contact your call centre if they can’t find the answers that they need. To deliver excellent customer service, you need to connect your agents’ internal knowledge and conversations that develop on social networks. In that way your clients will get answers quickly and remain happy. And it will also cost you less.

CRM Cloud Platform

CRM cloud apps should be easy to use for marketing, sales, and service professionals from any industry. That’s why smart firms depend on a CRM platform that provides them complete freedom to customize CRM for their company. It’s the best way to improve adoption and ensure that your CRM apps are working the way you want it to.

CRM Cloud Infrastructure

Successful CRM clients rely on a proven and trusted infrastructure—the data centre’s servers and software—for running their CRM applications. The CRM must have the following three characteristics to work effectively:

• High reliability — uptime exceeds 99.9%

• High performance — data access is in less than 300 ms

• High security — industry certifications like SAS 70 Type II and ISO27001

An effective CRM infrastructure is grounded on multi-tenancy: multiple customers are sharing common technology and are all running on the latest release; it’s like Amazon.com or Google. With multi-tenancy, you don’t have to worry about infrastructure or application upgrades since they happen automatically. In fact, multi-tenancy lets businesses focus on managing CRM rather than managing technology.