CRM - Managae your customers better

In today's constantly changing business scenario, customer relationship management or CRM has assumed prime importance. CRM is not just a technology but rather a comprehensive, customer-centric approach to an organization's philosophy of dealing with its customers. Information gained through CRM initiatives can support the development of marketing strategy by developing the organization's knowledge in areas such as identifying customer segments, improving customer retention, improving product offerings, and by identifying the organization's most profitable customers.

Zoho CRM offers customer relatoionship management functionality, procurement, inventory, and some accounting functions from the realm of ERP. The free version is limited to 3 users. It is a hosted SAAS solution. Zoho CRM empowers organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management in a single business system. Zoho Enterprise aims to meet the needs of corporate customers with such features as organizational management (including hierarchical group definitions), role-based security on data access and information sharing, SSL transport, and broader interface customizations.

Salesforce is one of the pioneers of the Software as a Service (SaaS) model of distributing business software, in which access to business software is purchased on a subscription basis and hosted offsite. They are best known for their customer relationship management (CRM) products, which it delivers to businesses over the internet using the SaaS model. The Salesforce CRM solution is broken down into several modules: Sales, Service & Support, Partner Relationship Management, Marketing, Content, Ideas and Analytics. Salesforce users can customize their CRM application. In the system, there are tabs such as "Contacts", "Reports", and "Accounts". Each tab contains associated information. For example, "Contacts" has standard fields like First Name, Last Name, and Email. Customization can be done on each tab, by adding user-defined custom fields. Customization can also be done at the "platform" level by adding customized applications to a Salesforce.com instance that is adding sets of customized / novel tabs for specific vertical- or function-level (Finance, Human Resources, etc) features. Recently Salesforce has introduced a slimmed down version of the Salesforce CRM software for use with high end business mobile phones. Language support is provided for multiple languages and even integration with web services is possible. As a programmer or developer, one can develop add-on applications that improve functionality of the original Salesforce CRM application. High security is one of the best features of the Salesforce CRM application.

Web services are system software's which are used to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over any network. It has an interface described in a machine-process able format. Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other web-related standards." Web services today are frequently just Application Programming Interfaces (API) or web APIs that can be accessed over a network, such as the Internet, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.