Making The Most Of Your CRM Investment

Briody's tips: choose carefully, make sure employees use it, ensure data is secure and keep it constantly updated. Well, there's more to it than that.

"Every once in a while a piece of technology so completely revolutionizes how we do something that we nearly forget how we ever got by without it, or even what we used to call it. For example, e-mailing used to be called "writing letters." And internet searches used to be called "going to the library."

Well, the same is true of customer relationship management. Though this sounds like something businesses have been doing for centuries, the term "customer relationship management" actually refers to a category of software that is specifically designed to organize and automate sales, marketing and customer service. It's more economically known as CRM, and it's fast becoming the technology solution that businesses big and small can't do without."