CRM

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It refers to software that manages a company's interactions with current and prospective customers across sales, customer service, marketing, and field operations. A CRM is typically organised around Accounts and Contacts, with activities, opportunities, cases, and campaigns hanging off them. Microsoft's CRM offerings inside Dynamics 365 include Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Operations, and Customer Insights, all built on Microsoft Dataverse. Modern CRM systems are deeply integrated with email, calendar, telephony, and AI assistants, and are licensed per user per month.

In practice, "buying a CRM" for most mid-market and enterprise customers now means buying one or more of Microsoft's specific apps (Sales for pipeline and quoting, Customer Service for case management, Field Service for dispatched technicians), not a single generic "CRM module" — the apps share the same Dataverse platform and data model, so an Account or Contact record is identical across all of them, but each app licenses and configures separately for its own process. This is why a company can run Sales without Customer Service, or vice versa, and still have one shared customer record underneath both once both are eventually adopted.

A common point of confusion, especially for buyers coming from a single-product background (Salesforce, HubSpot): "CRM" in the Microsoft ecosystem is a category, not a product name, and the specific app names (Sales, Customer Service) matter for licensing, feature comparison, and search — a guide about "Dynamics 365 CRM pricing" as a single thing doesn't quite exist, because pricing is set per app.