The science and art of customer relationship management: A blend of business processes and technology solutions

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is recognized as crucial in the success of any business in todayʹs relationship era where the main aim of an organization is to retain customers. A body of recent research shows that companies that have best harnessed change in CRM architectures have realized significant strategic advantage. CRM is about creating a competitive advantage by being the best at understanding, communicating, delivering and developing existing customer relationships in addition to creating and keeping new customers. An effective CRM strategy aims to personalize the customerʹs experiences across all organization touch points. By coordinating the customerʹs interactions, a firm is able to optimize customer satisfaction, which translates into increased profitability and revenue. Realizing the significance of CRM in the present relationship era, the firms across the globe have begun to think about CRM as integral to their marketing strategy. However, a successful CRM strategy calls for a perfect alignment between strategy, processes, technology and people. To ensure such coordination among the various components of Customer Relationship Management, a marketer must possess knowledge about its application and implications and therefore, the present paper makes a modest attempt to educate marketers about the same.