Chapter List

Overview

How well a company maintains its relationships with its customers may well determine its success. Knowing its customers and focusing on their needs enables a business to better deploy resources towards an effective outcome for everyone.

Since the first cave man profitably traded a bundle of furs for flint to make arrowheads, business strategies have focused on cultivation of the customer. Thus began the millennia-long march to refine techniques in customer relations. Over the centuries, many improvements were made to routine and manners, but not to strategy and applications that is until late in the 20th century.

With the debut of affordable, computerized technology in the late 1980's the first generation of CRM tools appeared. These DOS- or Unix-based products, usually referred to as "sales force automation" solutions, were, in reality, not much more than contact management tools. These products embodied little or no strategy or customization. It's only with the convergence of information technology, telecommunications, and the Internet that the whole concept of CRM really comes alive.

In the early to mid-1990s, e-commerce entered the scene offering customers more control over their purchasing choices, albeit at the sacrifice of personalized service. As customers exercised this power, companies looked for innovative ways to bring their increasingly fickle customers back into the fold. One early approach was to analyze shopping patterns. Soon software vendors of every shape and size jumped on...