preview

Customer Relationship Management ( Crm ) Practice

Better Essays

To find the most profitable customers in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) practice is an ongoing process where many companies fail to deliver the answer. This paper outlines various definitions of CRM, strategies, processes and the use of technology along with the various paradoxes that accompany Customer Relationship Management.

Defining CRM is not straight-forward as there are numerous definitions, taking three recent definitions the basic framework of CRM is, an overall process of building and maintaining profitable relationships by delivering customer satisfaction, customer value (Sen and Sinha, 2011) and enabling a firm to measure it’s customer equity as to improve the firm’s profitability (Fan and Ku, 2010). CRM is a …show more content…

According to Chan (2005), this is where all interactions should be tracked from distribution channels, sales and marketing, right through to the front of business service staff. As true feelings from customers can be captured through informal conversations with sales and service staff and using these inquiries can help build a customer’s profile. This is where the marketing concept is relevant, as to build these long-term, profitable relationships, the understanding of the customers’ needs is critical.
External knowledge sharing is very crucial in CRM for improving a company’s performance, for example the sharing of knowledge between an airline and a travel agency to purchase tickets. As well as the internal knowledge, for instance the sharing of knowledge within that travel agency. CRM is used within a social business like healthcare, financial services for the poor, or mission orientated business but these businesses are not measured on the profit made in a given period. With social businesses, fairness and trustworthiness is the goal (Gershoff et al., 2012).
For CRM to succeed within the hospitality and tourism it is thought that loyalty is vitally important and the longer the company keeps its customers, the more profit can be gained over a longer term (Kutner and Cripps, 1997; Gupta and Lehmann, 2003). Though Kumar and Rajan (2009) emphasise, “that managing customers for loyalty, however, does not amount to managing them for profitability. On the

Get Access