Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM) has become an essential component to ensuring business success. For those who aren’t familiar with the term CRM – it stands for Customer Relationship Management and is software which keeps all your customer information in one central location. This helps you to attract new customers at the same time as keeping existing customers happy. Essentially, not only will Customer Relationship Management enable you to become more efficient and effective, it will also improve the level of customer service which you can deliver, ultimately impacting on the level of customer satisfaction and therefore customer retention.

The concept of CRM in terms of storing all customer information in one place has been around for a number of years. However, the ways in which people do this varies significantly, some people use paper folders, others use spreadsheets and there are some who simply store information in their head. However, CRM software provides a central location where all information can be stored. Initially all deployments of CRM were On -Premise solutions, however, recent developments in technology mean that there is now a ‘cloud’ alternative. This has made CRM accessible to businesses of all sizes and as a result the popularity of the solution has increased significantly.

So, what is the difference between ‘cloud’ and on-premise solutions?
With an On-Premise deployment, an organisation will have the solution based on servers which are on their own site. With the on-premise option there is an additional cost associated with the investment required in new IT hardware and Infrastructure. However the benefits of the On-Premise deployment include: