Customer relationship management (CRM) is the way in which a company manages its relationships with customers. This covers a braod range of functions including sales, dealing with complaints and analysing the data generated by tracking all dealings with customers.
Because of the large amount of data involved and the complexity with which it has to be manipulated, this is very different from the management of transactions. This has made CRM software, which integrates different CRM functionality, a seizable part of the enterprise software industry.