• Happy customers buy more product.dollar image by Manika from Fotolia.com
  
  Customer relationship management (CRM) technology usually refers to software suites that promise increased efficiency to businesses, especially in the area of customer relationships. According to vendors, this software helps salespeople increases sales, helps customer service reps keep track of interactions and to access that information quickly and helps management keep its collective thumb on the pulse of the business, giving them real-time information so that they can better assess sales and profit. Vendors also say CRM helps customers by regularly assessing customer satisfaction and by predicting needs based on gathered information and observed habits.
  
  

The Dashboard

• The Dashboard and "Home" are sometimes synonymous. This is where employees are supposed to begin their work day. It gives up-to-date information on daily tasks, sales goals and achievements, leads, communications and more. It usually shows graphs of individual- and company-wide benchmarks. Often, CRM software offers different dashboards for different types of employees. For instance, a salesperson's dashboard will focus on sales, show pipelines and give statistics for different stages of the sales process. A customer service rep's dashboard will show open cases, number of closed cases, comparisons to other reps or the queue. The dashboard serves as a starting point and as a reference for employees throughout the working day.
  
  

The Contacts Panel

• The contacts panel is customizable by employees and management. It shows contact information for every account. Names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses are all available in the contacts list. CRM suites almost always make this list searchable, so if a salesperson or customer service rep is looking for contact information, but can't remember a piece of information, they can easily locate it. That's why, when you're calling a business, customer service reps can often look you up a variety of ways.
  
  

The Leads Panel

• The leads panel is primarily for individual salespeople or sales management. For individual salespeople, it shows possible connections, names and emails or phone numbers for people or institutions that have somehow expressed an interest in a product. These are submitted via the Internet, through email campaigns or by various other means. They're a benefit to salespeople, creating avenues to business that skip cold-calling.
  
  Sales managers can use the leads panel to assign leads to different sales reps and to monitor statistical information, numbers of leads based on different lead-collection campaigns.
  
  

The Accounts Panel

• The accounts panel is one that is used by almost every employee in a business, bottom to top. Sales reps use the accounts panels to access account information when digging for new sales, researching sales history with different accounts and assessing customer needs for the future. Customer service reps access accounts constantly when servicing customer needs and complaints. Management and executives use the accounts panel to build new partnerships and when experimenting with new products. The accounts panel is where CRM software is rooted. It's the database of information from which most of the other information comes.
  
  

Calendar

• The calendar (or "Tasks" or "Activity") panel is similar to many other calendars. It's where employees can both plan and track their daily activities, and it's where managers can plan activities for departments and for individuals.