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Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Tools Francis Buttle with John Turnbull Elsevier, Butterworth-Heinemann London and Boston, MA www.elsevier.com 2004 359 pp. Keywords Customer relations, Marketing strategy, Customer orientation Review DOI: 10.1108/07363760510605380
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the latest management trend intriguing the corporate world. This book is a balanced, well-researched and engaging treatise on the subject.
The book begins with an acknowledgment that "customer relationship management, or CRM, means different things to different people" (p. 3). The author, however, does a magnificent job of gathering the different perspectives, categorizing them, and presenting a comprehensive overview.
The first chapter, appropriately titled "Making sense of customer relationship management", presents three ways to think about CRM: strategic, operational and analytical. The author also offers a number of "misunderstandings" about CRM. In his view, CRM is not database marketing, a marketing process, an IT issue, or loyalty schemes. It is also not something that can be implemented by just any company. He follows these assertions with a balanced and thorough discussion of the issues surrounding CRM. The chapter subheadings give some idea of just how through:
* What is a relationship?
* Why companies want relationships with customers.
* Customer satisfaction, loyalty and business performance.
* But do customers want relationships with companies?
* CRM constituencies.
* Why do companies implement CRM?
* Contexts of CRM.
By the end of Chapter 1, we have a useful and comprehensive CRM definition:
CRM is the core business strategy that integrates internal processes and functions, and external networks, to create and deliver value to targeted customers at a profit. It is grounded on highquality customer data and enabled by IT (p. 34).
Chapter 2 presents a model that takes this definition as a point of departure - the "CRM Value Chain" (p. 39). The model's components comprise the bulk of the remainder of the text. Each stage in...