• Customer relationship management software, or CRM, provides businesses with software tools that integrate information from different databases spread throughout the company. Typically, CRM software integrates data from sales, accounting, customer service, technical support (if applicable) and marketing. The software presents all the information relating to a particular customer in a single interface for the users, often providing analysis of the customer's potential needs or interests.
  
  

Improved Customer Satisfaction

• When customers contact a business, the person with whom they interact may not have all the information about the customer readily available. A customer who has had multiple problems with a business' products may require different treatment than a customer who has had no problems at all. However, unless the company representative knows the customer's history, they will not be able to provide proactively the special consideration due to the customer. CRM software makes that possible by displaying all the information about the customer in a single view.
  
  

Improved Efficiency

• Customer interactions may require a business' employee to search through disconnected data sets. To provide a customer with a refund for a product, a customer service representative might need to know how the customer originally paid for the product, whether the customer received a discount due to a promotion, where to send payment to the customer and which sales representative sold the product and potentially collected a commission. By having all that information about a customer available in a single user interface, the representative can be much more efficient in serving the customer's needs.
  
  

Increased Productivity

• In customer service roles, productivity may be directly reflected in the number of customers a representative can serve in an allotted time. However, increasing the speed with which representatives serve customers can reduce the quality of service they provide. CRM software allows employees to serve customers more rapidly, without compromising quality, by reducing the amount of time required to search for and locate customer data.
  
  

Increased Sales

• CRM software can analyze trends in customer buying behavior to determine which customers are most likely to be interested in which products. For example, the software might observe that customers who bought widget A in the past often purchase widget B as well. In a sales conversation with customers, if the sales person knows that the customer bought widget A in the past, he can suggest widget B as a new purchase with a reasonable likelihood of success.