تحقیق مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری (1992-2002): یک مرور منابع آکادمیکی و طبقه بندی

Customer relationship management research (1992‐2002): An academic literature review and classification

Abstract

Purpose – To review the academic literature on customer relationship management (CRM), provide a comprehensive bibliography and propose a method of classifying that literature.

Design/methodology/approach – A range of online databases were searched to provide a comprehensive listing of journal articles on CRM. Six hundred articles were identified and reviewed for their direct relevance to CRM. Two hundred and five articles were subsequently selected. Each of these articles was further reviewed and classified. The review and classification process was independently verified. All papers were allocated to the main and sub-categories based on the major focus of each paper.

Findings – Papers and research on CRM falls into five broad categories (CRM – General, Marketing, Sales, Service and Support, and IT and IS) and a further 34 sub-categories. The most popular areas covered by the papers lay in the sub-category of CRM management, planning and strategy; and CRM general, concept, and study followed by papers in software, tools and systems; data mining, knowledge management, and e-commerce.

Originality/value – This is the first identifiable academic literature review of CRM research. The bibliography provides an academic database of the literature between 1992 and 2002 covering 89 journals. The classification approach provides a means to conceptualise the coverage of CRM and the relative popularity of CRM topic areas.

1 Introduction

Interest in customer relationship management (CRM) began to grow in 1990s (Ling and Yen, 2001; Xu et al., 2002). Regardless of the size of an organization, businesses are still motivated to adopt CRM to create and manage the relationships with their customers more effectively. An enhanced relationship with one’s customers can ultimately lead to greater customer loyalty and retention and, also, profitability. In addition, the rapid growth of the internet and its associated technologies has greatly increased the opportunities for marketing and has transformed the way relationships between companies and their customers are managed (Bauer et al., 2002)

.Although CRM has become widely recognized as an important business approach, there is no universally accepted definition of CRM. Swift (2001, p. 12) defined CRM as an “enterprise approach to understanding and influencing customer behaviour through meaningful communications in order to improve customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer profitability”. Kincaid (2003, p. 41) viewed CRM as “the strategic use of information, processes, technology, and people to manage the customer’s relationship with your company (Marketing, Sales, Services, and Support) across the whole customer life cycle”. Parvatiyar and Sheth (2001, p. 5) defined CRM as “a comprehensive strategy and process of acquiring, retaining, and partnering with selective customers to create superior value for the company and the customer. It involves the integration of marketing, sales, customer service, and the supply-chain functions of the organization to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness in delivering customer value”. These definitions emphasize the importance of viewing CRM as a comprehensive set of strategies for managing those relationships with customers that relate to the overall process of marketing, sales, service, and support within the organization. Moreover, information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) can be used to support and integrate the CRM process to satisfy the needs of the customer.

CRM is an attractive area for research because of its relative novelty and exploding growth. This paper presents a comprehensive review of CRM research conducted between 1992 and 2002 and published in academic journals, and a classification of this research. It is recognised that practitioner publications and reports also contain a great deal of material on CRM, but these were not selected for inclusion in this study which specifically focused on academic publication. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: first, the research methodology used in the study is described; second, the method for classifying CRM articles is presented; third, the CRM articles are analysed and the results of the classification are reported; and finally, the conclusions and implications of the study are discussed.