- Attain learning relationship using varied approaches throughout customer lifecycle.

- Maximize customer satisfaction and maintain customer loyalty.

- Convert human customer information into structured one stored in data warehouses and exposed to data mining.

- Smoother business processes, a better understanding of customer requirements, and customer loyalty.

- Behavior prediction and segmentation.

- Enhancement organizations’ customer service ability, to generate more revenue.

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Below are just some examples of CRM definitions.

- “CRM is a strategic approach concerned with creating improved shareholder value through the development of appropriate relationships with key customers and customer segments. CRM unites the potential of IT and relationship marketing strategies to deliver profitable, long-term relationships. Importantly, CRM provides enhanced opportunities to use data and information both to understand customers and implement relationship marketing strategies better. This requires a cross-functional integration of people, operations, processes and marketing capabilities that is enabled through information, technology and applications.” (Payne)

- "CRM is the values and strategies of relationship marketing – with particular emphasis on customer relationships – turned into practical application". (Gummesson)

- "CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a system and a technology designed to improve human interactions in a business environment". (Greenberg)

- "(…) a comprehensive approach for creating, maintaining and expanding customer relationships" (Anderson and Kerr)

- "CRM is the people, processes, and technology necessary to assure that the organization is in touch with the customer and suppliers". (Fjermestad and Romano)

- "(…) business approach that integrates people, process, and technology to maximize relationships with customers". (Goldenberg)

- "A marketing-led approach to building and sustaining long term business with customers". (Chaffey)

- “(…) a complex set of interactive processes that aims to achieve an optimum balance between corporate investments and the fulfilling of customer needs in order to generate maximum profit”. (Schierholz, Kolbe and Brenner)

- “CRM is a IT enhanced value process, which identifies, develops, integrates and focuses the various competencies of the firm to the “voice” of the customers in order to deliver long-term superior customer value, at a profit, to well identified and potential customer segments” (Plakoyiannaki and Tzokas)

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Frequently CRM is used interchangeably with terms such as ‘relationship marketing’, ‘customer relationship marketing’, ‘customer management’, among others. One of the first definitions of ‘Relationship Marketing’ back in 1983 was that it was about attracting, maintaining and – in multi-service organizations – enhancing customer relationships.

In the traditional marketing management paradigm (the 4Ps) relationships play a secondary role. In fact, Relationship Marketing represents a move from functionally base marketing to cross-functionally based marketing. Marketing-mix is an internally producer-oriented approach while the second focuses more on developing service value through relationship development. But the challenge lies in putting all this theory in practice.

During the late 1990s industry believed that CRM was going to transform a singlechannel, product-oriented organization into a multi-channel, customer centric organization with the ability to sell to profitable and loyal customers on the back of seamlessly integrated processes and systems. CRM can provide a better management of customer data, faster sales, improve the targeting of marketing programs, but only if the organization is in fact customer oriented.

But what in reality happened between late 1990s until middle of this decade was that numerous software programs were sold, aiming to create higher levels of customer satisfaction and retention. In fact, many organizations adopted CRM as a way of increasing the efficiency of marketing actions, higher cross-selling and upselling, which is nothing more than another version of the sales-driven view of marketing. Even though organizations may be very pleased in knowing more about customers and providing to them more and more features/services, this same enthusiasm is not shared by the customers. Customer satisfaction can often be negatively affected – which is the exact opposite of the goal they expected to achieve with CRM.

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