A Framework for Customer Relationship Management

TLDR

The Web offers companies unprecedented opportunities to interact with customers, enabling better relationships and driving a new marketing mantra, though CRM meanings vary across stakeholders. The article aims to develop a comprehensive CRM model that integrates seven phases: database creation, analysis, customer selection, targeting, relationship marketing, privacy issues, and new evaluation metrics. The authors construct the model by delineating these seven sequential phases—database creation, analysis, customer selection, targeting, relationship marketing, privacy considerations, and metric development. The article discusses how CRM will shape future marketing organizations.

Abstract

The essence of the information technology revolution and, in particular, the World Wide Web is the opportunity afforded companies to choose how they interact with their customers. The Web allows companies to build better relationships with customers than has been previously possible in the offline world. This revolution in customer relationship management (CRM) has been referred to as the new mantra of marketing. However, a problem is that CRM means different things to different people. This article develops a comprehensive CRM model incorporating seven phases: database creation, analysis of the database, customer selection, customer targeting, relationship marketing, privacy issues, and new metrics necessary for evaluating the CRM effort. The article also discusses the implications of CRM for future marketing organizations.