Abstract:

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the few emerging businesses recording significant growth since 2000 despite the recent worldwide economic downturn. CRM covers a wide range of business functions including operation workflow, sales force automation, customer service, marketing, cross selling and up selling. Through each of these business functions, CRM collects, manages and analyzes customer data to achieve customer insights for business organizations to improve their services and increase their profits. The nature of CRM is very similar to Market Research although they are not equivalent. Both areas aimed to transform the collected or available data into meaningful knowledge for business decision making and strategy planning. This paper explains the objectives and development process of CRM programs. It highlights significant issues in implementing a customer-centric CRM model and in particular how market research can assist and improve the implementation of CRM programs.