Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is getting more and more a key strategy for companies big and small. Customer care strategy and CRM software go hand in hand. In particular SME’s need a CRM software that easily adapts to their customer care needs while still being low cost. In this paper I discuss the benefits of CRM for SME’s and their special requirements wrt. CRM software. Further, I intro-duce the IST-project CARUSO whose objective is to provide SME’s with a software framework to implement low cost, customized CRM applications. This paper presents the rational behind the CARUSO project, the architecture of the framework, and the software development process used to build the framework.