Customer Relationship Management is a critical aspect for businesses of any size today, be it a small sized organization, a midsized company or a billion dollar enterprise. It is considered a best practise to keep the customer related data also known as customer profiles properly organized right from the start as it grows exponentially with the size of the company and is nearest to impossible to manage later. Since computers have entered the realm of business world lately, CRM provisioning is also done electronically by means of specialized software known as CRM Software Applications. These are specialized software that use centralized data bases for storing customer profiles and related data and make it available to the company's workforce at the click of a button, anytime. This helps the company in ensuring smooth operations when dealing with customers without missing any important customer details.

Apart from making the work easy for the company’s workforce, it helps maintaining consistency in record keeping and also helps in generating comprehensive reports for detailed analysis of customer data for management purpose as well as for day to day performance and statistical analysis. Generally, these programs are either installed on company's own data servers and used on the premises or else are hosted by the seller company of the software on its own or one of its partner's servers, know as hosted CRM software programs.