Welcome to the world of customer relationship management, or CRM. When a company puts its relationships with customers at the forefront of its business model, it sees higher profits, better customer retention, and increased customer satisfaction.

Today, CRM is largely managed by software. A CRM platform assists customer service agents, helps marketers predict trends, and guides sales teams to successfully close deals. It acts as the singular source for your company’s customer data and information, and lets anyone quickly research whatever information they need, from the overall big picture to a single customer’s unique quirks and history with your company.

A CRM solution helps companies treat each customer with personalized, timely care — a tenet of a successful relationship.

Salesforce’s Intelligent Customer Success Platform, for example, is the World’s Smartest CRM. Powered by Einstein, artificial intelligence is baked right into Salesforce, so companies don’t have to think about it and they can discover insights to make smarter decisions, predict outcomes to focus where it matters, recommend next actions to increase efficiency and automate tasks to do more with less.

This is how a CRM system can help an organization grow: It saves your company time so each employee, from the front desk manager to the CEO, can spend more time with customers, clients, and contacts.

We’ve assembled a library of resources to help improve your CRM knowledge. These resources explain the benefits of a CRM, how cloud computing works, and why companies of all sizes — and in all industries — use CRM platforms to succeed.

This is how CRM is helpful for management: A CRM platform helps integrate all your departments, gives you a unified view of your customers, and helps you engage deeply with them and prospects to achieve your business goals faster.

The best CRM platform unites all departments in order to provide a seamless customer experience.

At its most basic, cloud computing is using the internet to access software, servers, and infrastructure provided by cloud computing providers. When you use a CRM platform that exists in the cloud, you can access your data from anywhere, no matter if you on your computer at your desk, on your tablet while on the road, or on your smartphone in the field. A cloud-based CRM solution instantly updates data and is available wherever and whenever you need it.