TABLE OF CONTENTS In an era of increasingly transient management themes, few board agenda items are attracting the sustained attention of Customer Relationship Management, or CRM. To provide some measure of the explosion of management interest in CRM, UK market research company Forrester Research searched the Dow Jones content base of more than 6000 management publications for references about CRM and found 6048 articles in 2000, up from 442 articles in 1998 (Chatham et al. 2001).
This sudden proliferation of references can be partly explained by the lack of a widely accepted definition for CRM: consequently managers and writers use the term broadly to describe all forms of transactions between customers and their suppliers. In this book, we look at CRM as an organization-wide process, which focuses its activities on treating different customers differently to increase value for both customer and organization. In an article on its web site, the European Centre for Customer Strategies quotes Hewson Consulting s definition of CRM as a business strategy focusing on winning, growing and keeping the right customers (European Centre for Customer Strategies 2001). A recent CRM report published by the Financial Times (Ryals et al. 2000) suggests that CRM consists of three main elements:
identifying, satisfying, retaining and maximizing the value of the firm s best customers;
wrapping the firm around the customer to ensure that each contact with the customer is appropriate and based upon extensive knowledge both of the customer s needs and profitability;
creating a complete picture of the customer.
The Financial Times report...
