Customer Relationship Management and Technology

During the last decade, increasing attention has been given to relationship marketing as a way to enhance cooperation between a selling company and its customers and bring benefits to both parties. Globalization and technology improvements have exposed companies to a situation with tough competition. Relationship marketing allows a selling company to better meet competition and exceed their competitors, and hence relationship marketing becomes an important determinator of success in the increasingly competitive business world of today. One method of relationship marketing is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Nowadays, new technologies have empowered customer relationship management (CRM) to dominate marketing paradigms. However, a large proportion of CRM practices do not yield expected profits. Yet, this phenomenon is attributed to a misconception of CRM and the role of technology in its implementation as there are diverse attitudes toward this issue. Some interpret CRM through a technological framework, and assume software solutions are what the organization mainly needs for leveraging CRM whereas others contend that CRM is more than a technology, and underscore some required considerations including formulating customer-focused strategy, user involvement, and process alignment before CRM execution. Here, these different perspectives are organized into two main groups of technological and non-technological perspectives, and consequently the position they appreciate for technology in CRM will be pondered and compared.