What are the essential Salesforce Platform features a beginner should learn to improve customer relationship management?

Use trailhead within Salesforce to learn some of the basics. I found self learning with Salesforce the best use of time. You can create your own trail on the topics that you want to complete and then it will recommend best next steps. It will depend how you want to improve customer relationship management, is it the process, understanding data driven decisions the list is totally endless, but I would break it down into chunks and answer the following questions: - What do you want to improve - What does good look like It could be as simple as improving a case layout, so you want to look at objects and fields, or it could be about dashboards and reporting

Below mentioned points might help you as a beginner into Salesforce CRM: 1) Creating objects and fields 2) User permissions 3) Flows 4) Page layouts and Record Pages. These are good to go as of now, there are lot of things to explore in this.

Need to learn CRM data model and OOB functionality of the Salesforce CRM . Also better to start Salesforce Flow learning .

Learn how to create new accounts, and update existing leads and contacts.