You should start by understanding what is CRM? Customer Relationship Management. IN order to "manage" a "relationship" with your customers, you should collect as much data as possible (and store it). If they're persons: birthdate, gender, location. If they're companies: locations, relevant people. And for both of them, based on the Product/Services that you provide, get the history of purchases/interests.
Once all this data is there, stored (on Databases), you can take it forward with a couple tools:
- Business Rules: To provide an advanced follow up or insights on who takes a decision, communication, etc.
- You can leverage on AI to provide insights regarding the process and the customer: how often they show interest in a particular process, how often your processes produce the required result, what kind of other products/services might be of interest?
With this, you can identify 4 components of a CRM:
> Storing the data. Yes, Databases (in plural) will be most of it. And you need to manage relationships between different tables. But also, there might be data that is non-structured (not subject to regular tables): An image, or if the customer has a social network profile that you can follow.
> Presenting the data: The front end part should have an easy model to bring the information grouped and as easiest as possible.
> A business Logic layer, that makes the processing: Workflows, Approvals, Processes to follow. This will ensure that future processes can be modelled and follow the same steps.
> AI, to provide insight on different steps
Regardsd