Best Practice
Customer relationship management
The 1990s saw a revolution in marketing practice, in which new thinking about how companies should relate to customers coincided with the development of cheaper, more powerful IT systems that could enable a new way of handling customer relationships. In a very short period, what had been known to direct marketers as database marketing became relationship marketing, and IT suppliers rapidly provided software that helped turn this into CRM a broader, companywide concept.
CRM has often been technologyled (1), and suppliers have focused on three areas, which are increasingly integrated (10):
- call centre and...