Ebook Customer Relationship Management: Emerging Practice, Process, and Discipline
Customer relationship management (CRM) has attracted the expanded attention of practitioners and scholars. More and more companies are adopting customer centric strategies, programs, tools, and technology for efficient and effective customer relationship management. They are realizing the need for in-depth and integrated customer knowledge in order to build close cooperative and partnering relationships with their customers. The emergence of new channels and technologies is significantly altering how companies interface with their customers, a development bringing about a greater degree of integration between marketing, sales, and customer service functions in organizations. For practitioners, CRM represents an enterprise approach to developing full-knowledge about customer behavior and preferences and to developing programs and strategies that encourage customers to continually enhance their business relationship with the company.
Marketing scholars are studying the nature and scope of CRM and are developing conceptualizations regarding the value and process of cooperative and collaborative relationships between buyers and sellers. Many scholars with interests in several sub-disciplines of marketing, such as channels, services marketing, business-to-business marketing, advertising, and so forth, are actively engaged in studying and exploring the conceptual foundations of managing relationships with customers. They are interested in strategies and processes for customer classification and selectivity; one-to-one relationships with individual customers; key account management and customer business development processes; frequency marketing, loyalty programs, cross selling and up-selling opportunities; and various forms of partnering with customers including co-branding, joint-marketing, co-development, and other forms of strategic alliances (Parvatiyar & Sheth, 2000).
Scholars from other academic disciplines, particularly those interested in the area of information systems and decision technologies, are also exploring new methodologies and techniques that create efficient front line information systems (FIS) to effectively manage relationships with customers. Several software tools and technologies claiming solutions for various aspects of CRM have recently been introduced for commercial application. The majority of these tools promise to individualize and personalize relationships with customers by providing vital information at every point in the interface with the customer. Techniques such as collaborative filtering, rule-based expert systems, artificial intelligence, and relational databases are increasingly being applied to develop enterprise level solutions for managing information on customer interactions. The purpose of this paper is not to evaluate these application tools and technologies.
Those aspects are considered elsewhere by the authors as well as by several commercial research organizations, such as Forrester Research and the Gartner Group. Our objective is to provide a conceptual foundation for understanding the domain of customer relationship management. To do so, we develop a framework for understanding the various aspects of CRM strategy and implementation. A synthesis of the existing knowledge on CRM done by integrating diverse explorations forms the basis of our framework. We draw upon the literature on relationship marketing, as CRM and relationship marketing are not distinguished from each other in the marketing literature (Parvatiyar & Sheth, 2000).
In the sections that follow, we define what CRM is and what it promises to offer. We also identify the forces impacting on the marketing environment in recent years that have led to the rapid development of CRM strategies, tools, and technologies. A typology of CRM programs is presented to provide a parsimonious view of the various terms and terminologies that are used to refer to different activities. We then describe a process model of CRM to better delineate the challenges of customer relationship formation, its governance, its performance evaluation, and its evolution. Finally, we examine the research issues related to CRM.
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