Customer Relationship Management

Today, customer relationship management is very important to the business world. Most of the companies established a department and the programs to manage their relationship with the customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy which designed to help a company to understand and look forward to the needs of its potential and current customers (Anderson & Stang, 2000). Customer data is being collected in several different areas of the company, stored in a central database, analyzed, and distributed to key points (Anderson & Stang, 2000).The business world once was “product-centric”, the companies just provided what they could produce. However, it is now become “customer-centric”, they provide products and service according to need and want of the customers. Therefore, the customer data is essential for the companies to manage the relationship and understand the needs and wants of the customers. From the year of 2001 to 2009, the failure rates of customer relationship management have been recorded by different research companies. AMR research recorded the lowest rate of 18% and Butler Group recorded the highest failure rate of 70% among the years (Krigsman , 2009). The average failure rate among the years is around 41%. Such rates don’t stop the companies to develop the customer relationship management as it is so important and cannot be ignored.

The concept of CRM that began in the early 1970's has evolved rapidly in a global scale (Kpability, n.d.). The change and evolution of information technology in 1990s has encouraged the companies to change their ways of conducting the business. The technology of sales automation and call center operations already has developed in customer relationship management ...

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