What is a CRM? Why it matters and how to pick one

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A CRM is a software platform that collects, consolidates, analyzes, and stores customer data from emails, text messages, website interactions, and much more. This information helps businesses manage and nurture their relationships with individual customers or other businesses.

CRMs keep this customer data in one place, giving you a single source of truth for customer data, as well as marketing automation, customer service, and reporting and analytics.

Depending on whether you’re in marketing, sales, or customer service, a CRM may help you work more efficiently, create better experiences for your customers, or generate revenue. Many CRMs also integrate AI-powered personalization and insights so that you can improve communication across channels and throughout the customer lifecycle.

The term “CRM” is thrown around a lot, though. You might hear people use it to describe everything from a simple contact list to an advanced platform that handles every aspect of customer management.

Where your CRM falls on that spectrum matters. Depending on how it gathers and organizes your business data, it can help you get a step ahead of your customers, and move from being reactive to being proactive.

What’s the difference between a B2B CRM and a B2C CRM?

Think about the last major purchase decision at your company vs. the last time you bought something for yourself.

When you’re buying something for your company, you’re combing through demos, getting advice from your team, comparing pricing plans, and running it by your boss. Research from HockeyStack reveals B2B SaaS buyers engage in an average of 266 touchpoints before sealing the deal. The whole process can take weeks, or months, and there are dozens of people putting in their two cents along the way.

By comparison, making a consumer purchase might look like seeing an Instagram ad, checking out some reviews, browsing the website a few times, abandoning your cart (oops), getting a reminder email, and finally making the purchase—all within a few days or minutes. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 online shopping report, 77% of omnichannel shoppers use 3–4 channels to research and make a purchase for themselves.

Both journeys create tons of information about what customers want and how they act. Without a good system to track it all, this information gets buried in spreadsheets, lost in email chains, or just lives in someone’s head. And scattered data makes it harder for customer-facing teams to collaborate, automate, and drive growth. 

A CRM solves that problem for both journeys. But traditional CRMs were built for B2B sales cycles, not with B2C’s fast-paced purchasing behaviors and high-volume customer cases in mind. Here’s a breakdown of why that distinction matters:

Factor	B2B CRM	B2C CRM
Relationship focus	Account-level management	Individual customer management
Volume	Hundreds to thousands of accounts	Millions of individual customers
Sales cycle	Long and complex (weeks to months)	Short and transactional (minutes to days)
Key features	Lead scoring, account management, buying committee tracking	Marketing automation, personalization, omnichannel engagement
Personalization	High-touch, manual for key accounts	Automated, scaled for millions
Channels	Email, phone, in-person meetings	Email, text messaging, web, WhatsApp, social, in-store

Why do businesses need a CRM?

Although both B2B and B2C CRMs centralize customer data and improve team collaboration, they handle very different customer relationships, and offer different advantages for each type of business.

For B2B businesses, a CRM:

• Improves customer satisfaction and retention in the long-term through personalized communication
• Uncovers insights from customer and prospect interactions that help you generate more revenue
• Provides shared access to data, encouraging collaboration between teams

For B2C businesses, a CRM:

• Brings together every customer interaction from across channels so you can tailor marketing messages at scale and offer timely support
• Improves the customer experience through personalized recommendations and top-tier customer service
• Drives business growth with better marketing campaigns and automations, with real-time behavioral targeting and smart product recommendations
• Consolidates your tech stack from dozens of tools to a single source of truth, reducing costs and encouraging collaboration

Beyond the high-level differences between B2B and B2C use cases, here’s how each customer-facing team can use a CRM:

Why use a CRM for marketing?

Between email opens, social media DMs, website visits, and form submissions, marketing teams are overloaded with customer data. Trying to make sense of it all manually is nearly impossible, which may be why 44% of marketers made CRMs a top investment in 2025, according to Klaviyo’s 2025 State of B2C Marketing Report.

CRMs for marketing pull all these interactions together and automate messages like follow-up emails, so marketers can focus on big-picture strategy. Here’s how that works in practice:

• B2B CRMs track marketing activities like downloading whitepapers, attending events, and requesting demos at both the contact and company levels, helping teams identify high-quality leads. Similar to a B2C CRM, this data helps you send more personalized messaging to attract, engage, and convert your target audience.
• B2C CRMs centralize customer data from various channels so you can send personalized messages like product recommendations based on browsing history, automatically follow up based on customer actions, and create customer segments for more targeted communication.

Both B2B and B2C marketing CRMs also have detailed analytics and ROI tracking so you can tie marketing activities to revenue.

Why use a CRM for sales?

When sales teams manage dozens of opportunities at once, it’s easy for information to slip through the cracks. A CRM gives your sales team a complete view of every deal in your pipeline or customer purchase. 

Here’s how it works, depending on your business model:

• B2B CRMs track every touchpoint—like discovery calls, demo feedback, and website visits—and automate outreach and follow-ups. This data helps you figure out when a prospect is ready to buy, like when multiple people from the same organization keep coming back to your pricing page.
• B2C CRMs track what individual customers have purchased and what they’re interested in, making it easier to suggest relevant products during future conversations and help find up-sell opportunities, like showing which products customers typically buy together.

Why use a CRM for customer service?

Few things frustrate customers more than having to repeat themselves every time they reach out to customer support. And when your team is fielding questions across email, phone, and chat, it’s tough to keep track of who said what and when.

According to Klaviyo’s 2026 customer service research, 62% of customer service teams use a CRM. It’s easy to see why: it brings together every support conversation in one place, so your team can stop digging through old email threads or asking customers redundant questions.

Here’s how service teams use CRMs:

• B2B CRMs track everything about each support ticket, like which features the customer uses, what’s in their contract, and previous issues, to help customer service teams solve problems faster and look for up-sell or contract renewal opportunities.
• B2C CRMs allow both AI and human agents to pull up someone’s purchase history, previous support interactions, and preferences right away, so customers don’t have to explain everything from scratch. Using a CRM that includes a helpdesk in the same system, you can also automatically send tickets to the right agent or trigger a follow-up message a few days later to check in.

What problems do CRMs solve?

Just having a CRM doesn’t automatically deliver on those benefits. You need to figure out what specific challenges are bogging down your marketing, sales, and customer service teams, like:

Fragmented customer data

If your customer information is siloed—sales notes in one system, email history in another, support tickets somewhere else—no one on your team is getting the full context. And proving ROI is difficult when marketing, service, and sales data are disconnected. 

A CRM that houses all this data in one place helps solve this challenge because:

• Sales teams know what customer questions have already been answered and what concerns still need to be addressed to close a deal or guide a customer to make a purchase.
• Marketing teams can understand every interaction a customer has had with your business, then use that data to personalize future outreach and messaging. And, they can quickly understand which marketing activities are actually driving revenue.
• Service teams can adjust their communication based on a customer’s history and preferred channels, and quickly access customer information from any source when they need it.

Hospitality company Eureka! Restaurant Group originally had their customer data scattered across 5 different platforms, which made it difficult for the group to attribute revenue to their email program or segment based on customer preferences and activity.

After switching to a CRM that centralizes all of their customer data, including data from their various integrations, Eureka! can easily target segments, like people who have ordered whiskey at Eureka! to promote Whiskey Club memberships.

Poor collaboration between teams 

According to our State of B2C Marketing Report, nearly 1 in 5 marketers report collaboration challenges across sales, marketing, and customer service as the top barrier to achieving a unified customer view. 

When customer-facing teams don’t work together from the same data, it both creates internal inefficiencies, and negatively impacts the customer experience. This might look like sending mixed messages from marketing and sales, duplicating efforts between marketing and service, or investing heavily in marketing campaigns that aren’t generating revenue.

A CRM breaks down silos by giving every team access to the same customer data, so you can:

• Spot trends you might have otherwise missed. Marketing might notice engagement dropping while service sees ticket volume rising. Together, those signals point to a problem. On their own, they’re just noise.
• Make smarter decisions about where to focus effort. Shared dashboards show which customers are most engaged, which need attention, and which opportunities are slipping through the cracks, so every team knows who to prioritize.
• Improve the customer experience. Suppress marketing messages when customers are actively talking to customer support to resolve an issue, adjust marketing messages based on customer service interactions, or provide more personalized customer support interactions based on marketing data.

Tea brand Harney & Sons had a fragmented service and retention tech stack, which caused challenges for both their customers and their in-house team. When they moved to a CRM with a built-in, AI-powered helpdesk, their service team started working more efficiently: visibility into customer profiles and marketing data now helps them resolve tickets with less toggling between tabs.

In 30 days, Harney & Sons saw a 25% period-over-period reduction in average service ticket resolution time using the helpdesk in their CRM. 

Generic, one-size-fits-all marketing

Sending the same message to everyone on your list on the channels you think they’ll engage on might be easy. But someone who bought from you yesterday doesn’t need to see the same text message as someone who has never made a purchase. And there’s no value in sending messages to a customer who never reads them.

Moving away from bland, generic messages towards marketing that speaks to what a customer is doing or telling you with their actions improves the customer experience and drives revenue. Klaviyo’s 2025 Future of Consumer Marketing Report reveals that more than 1 in 5 consumers say recommendations based on their previous purchase or browsing history influence them to buy from a brand.

CRMs track in real time what a customer has browsed, what they’ve bought, and how they engage with messages. With this information, you can personalize your marketing based on:

• What stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in: New B2C customers get welcome messages and product recommendations, while repeat buyers see loyalty rewards. In B2B, leads who downloaded resources receive educational content, while prospects who’ve attended demos get pricing details and case studies. Everyone sees relevant messages based on their relationship with your business.
• When and where they prefer to get information: Reach customers on their preferred channels—whether that’s email, text message, or social media—and send messages at times when they’re most likely to engage, like evenings for B2C customers or business hours for B2B contacts.

Drinkware brand Corkcicle was worried about inefficient sending. Without a consolidated tech stack, they had trouble managing messaging cadence across channels. For example, subscribers would get a triggered email, then two triggered texts, all in the same day as a campaign email.

To make sure people get relevant messages on the best channels for them, Corkcicle implemented a CRM with AI-powered personalization features like channel affinity. Now, they send messages where subscribers are most likely to engage with them. Their most efficient segment is customers who’ve engaged in the last 90 days who prefer email.

Ineffective and inefficient customer service

When customer service inquiries pile up, customer service teams waste valuable time toggling between tools, leading to slower response times and poorer customer satisfaction.

A CRM streamlines customer service by giving teams access to complete customer profiles and interaction history, so they can:

• Get full customer context in one place. That means they can quickly access previous purchases, order information, shipping estimates, subscription renewals, marketing and sales history, and past support conversations from any channel.
• Get insights into which marketing messages drive spikes in service inquiries, and spot patterns before they impact conversion and lead to more tickets.
• Speed up issue resolution with self-service options, like a customer hub where customers can track their order history, shipping timelines, and more, or an AI customer agent that can resolve common customer inquiries and escalate to a human when necessary. 

Clothing brand Ministry of Supply struggled with impersonal account pages: to view their accounts, customers had to leave Ministry of Supply’s online store. After implementing a customer hub in their CRM, customers can now check out the hub while they shop and see recently viewed items, order history with product page links for repurchasing, and more.

Now, Ministry of Supply is able to deflect more support tickets. In a year, account holders completed over 12,000 self-serve support interactions in the customer hub.

What’s the right CRM for your business? 6 questions to ask

Over 1,500 CRMs compete in the market as of 2024, each offering a variety of features. Here’s what to evaluate when you’re selecting one:

1. Does it connect to your current tech stack? Choose a platform with built-in integrations and real-time syncing, since delayed data can mean missed opportunities.
2. Can your team use it easily? Look for easy-to-use platforms with clean interfaces that don’t require a training manual to figure out. Teams should be able to log a support ticket, track a sales call, or build a marketing campaign without calling IT for help.
3. Does it use AI to improve efficiency and optimize the customer experience? Check if your CRM has built-in AI that takes care of time-consuming work like drafting customer emails, predicting which customers might churn, or flagging support tickets that need immediate attention. And look for CRMs with pre-built AI agents that can become members of your team.
4. Can you adapt it to how your business works? Your CRM should let you customize fields and processes to match your business goals. Focus on customization in areas that make your team more effective.
5. Can it keep up with your business as you grow? Choose a CRM with flexible pricing tiers and the ability to deal with increasing customer volume, data complexity, and automation needs. Your platform should grow with you without sacrificing performance or requiring a complete overhaul.
6. Does it work across all the ways you interact with customers? Check if your CRM can track customer interactions across email, phone calls, live chat, social media, video calls, and any other channel your business uses.

Getting started with your CRM

Once you’ve chosen a CRM, here’s how to implement it:

1. Migrate your data. Decide on the type of customer data you need, and move existing customer information from spreadsheets, email lists, sales records, and support tickets into your new CRM. Make sure the data is accurate and complete—clean data from the start gives everyone a reliable foundation and saves time in the long run.
2. Connect your integrations. Link your CRM to the platforms you already use, like your ecommerce store, point-of-sale system, shipping software, subscription management tool, or any other customer-facing or internal software that’s necessary to your operations. The data from these new tools should automatically flow into your CRM after set-up.
3. Get your team up to speed. Train everyone who’ll use the CRM, including customer service, sales, and marketing teams. Use your CRM’s knowledge base, training materials, or a dedicated onboarding specialist to get the most out of your new system.

With Klaviyo B2C CRM, you have everything you need to deliver personalized, connected customer experiences, including: 

• Klaviyo Data Platform: Bring your customer data from your store, marketing interactions, support conversations, and other touchpoints under one roof, so every interaction starts with full context.
• Klaviyo Marketing: Power personalized experiences across channels with marketing automation, and build launch-ready campaigns with K:AI Marketing Agent.
• Klaviyo Service: Connect customer service and marketing, so support teams can see a customer’s full history before responding to questions. Customer Hub empowers customers to track orders and update preferences, K:AI Customer Agent handles common questions automatically, and Helpdesk helps humans manage support tickets.
• Klaviyo Analytics: Understand performance, identify opportunities, and improve experiences across the entire customer journey.