Building customer focused organizations for superior performance through customer relationship management

The biggest mistake anyone can make is to focus on the competitor. You focus on the consumer and you will get it right.

-K B Dadiseth

An understanding of how to manage relationships with customers effectively has become an important topic for both academicians and practitioners in recent years. During the last century, wars were fought for land. But in the new millennium “wars” are being fought for markets. As business gets more and more complicated, no customer base is impenetrable. In today's world, where paradigm shifts are the order of the day, change is the only factor. Companies are facing new market realities, i.e. changing demographics, more sophisticated customers and over capacity in many industries, leading to fewer customers to go ground. Many companies are now fighting for shares of a relatively flat or sluggish market. In the wake of these changes, Customer Relationship Management has emerged as centric business culture, which helps in effective marketing of the brand. CRM refers to the use of a wide range of marketing, sales and promotional techniques and processes to identify, create and manage customers. Customer satisfaction is directly proportional to expectation management. The present study will provide conceptual framework for customer relationship management that helps broaden the understanding of CRM and its role in enhancing customer value and, as a result, shareholder value. The impact of globalization and worldwide competition has forced firms to modify their strategies toward a real time operation with respect to customer's requirements. Customer relationship management has become the bridge by which companies get, keep and grow customers. This behavior, together with the possibilities of communication offered by the up to date Information and Communication Technologies, moves the top management toward the concept of extended enterprise in which a collaborative link is established among supplier, commercial partners and customers.