1 - Strategic customer management
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2013
Summary
The strategic management of customer relationships is a critical activity for all enterprises. The means of effectively managing relationships with customers are typically addressed under the headings of relationship marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), to name but two terms used to describe the management of customer relationships. Resources applied to such relationship management initiatives are substantial and growing. For example, global expenditure just on CRM activity has been estimated to exceed US $100 billion when CRM-related implementation services are considered.
Since the early 1980s, relationship marketing has become the topic of great interest to both marketing scholars and marketing practitioners. In the increasingly mature and complex markets of the twenty-first century, organisations have learned that building relationships and sustaining them is usually more important than activities focusing on customer acquisition. Much of the recent interest in relationship marketing has evolved from the work undertaken in industrial marketing and services marketing in this period, although antecedents of relationship marketing can be traced back to ancient times. The importance of the topic of relationships in marketing is now undisputed.
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- Strategic Customer ManagementIntegrating Relationship Marketing and CRM, pp. 3 - 36Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013