The Implementation of Relationship Marketing and CRM: How to Become a Customer-Focused Organization
The marketing environment has changed significantly in the past decade, such as globalization, increasingly fierce
competition, technology development, and so forth. Today’s customers have more expectation in shopping
experience and wish to interact with suppliers closely. They have more choices and their demands often change
quickly. The old marketing approach, one to mass marketing, is not suitable to the changing environment. The
one to one marketing approach is the trend for companies to achieve sustainable competitive advantage against
competitors. For many industries and companies, their most profits come from a small number of loyal and
profitable customers. The Pareto rule suggests that 80% of profits are generated by 20% of customers. Therefore,
how to understand customers and keep the profitable customers is the key task for companies. Relationship
marketing and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) will help companies achieve those objectives.
Currently, more and more companies implement CRM system, however, many of them don’t achieve the
expected performance or even failed. One of the main reasons is that those companies just regard CRM project as
technological project or marketing project rather than consider it to be a whole organization change and long-term
strategy. Actually, when implementing the CRM system, companies should consider many critical success factors
with a holistic view, such as organizational structure, corporate culture, reward system, training system, and so
forth. This study is to explore what critical success factors affect the success of CRM implementation and how
companies integrate these CSFs to facilitate the implementation.