CRM software (Customer Relationship Management)

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management.The generally accepted purpose of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is to enable organizations to better serve its customers through the introduction of reliable processes and procedures for interacting with those customers.

It is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends.

CRM helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of the customers.
Our reports on the latest Legal IT survey, which looks at the way firms implement CRM systems and finds that there is much room for improvement.

In the legal sector, we often hear vague mutterings about client relationship management (CRM) rarely delivering a great deal of value and often creating a cynical mindset among lawyers. There are few great success stories, but perhaps this is because CRM is all about gaining competitive advantage. Law firms are often reticent about their marketing methods and many of them tend to treat all manifestations of direct salesmanship, including its more respectable relative, account management. Perhaps those keeping quietest about CRM are those who have actually made it work.

Logically, if CRM is working, we should be able to see a noticeable change in the firm’s business. Ideally, managers are looking for an improvement in revenues but tracing this back to a software system is hellishly difficult. When credit is due, few of us will rebuff the praise and admit that it was our software, not us, that made the difference.

There must be a better way to measure the success or failure of CRM. In commoditised industries, large organisations have a sufficiently large customer base that they can generate meaningful statistics on customer retention and repeat business. They have also dehumanised or, to put it more kindly, depersonalised their services with work-flow systems, keep a tight rein on employees’ working practices and, therefore, can more easily attribute changes in productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and the like, to the CRM system they installed six months ago.

CRM can deliver a noticeable change in the effectiveness of client care if it is deployed correctly, if the fee earners are well trained in its usage and if they understand why they are being encouraged to use it. By integrating business intelligence tools.Practice management, document management and other systems, it should be possible for fee earners to gain an extensive, if not complete, view of what is going on in the client’s business. They should then be properly prepared to speak to that client. Strangely, while this sort of information resource is a popular idea in business development, fee-earners rarely seem to bother using it.

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