Since e-CRM (electronic customer relationship management) relates to selling, serving or communicating to customers via the Web, e-CRM can be regarded as a subset of CRM, meaning that e-CRM is one channel through which a company can deploy its CRM strategy.
Published in Chapter:
E-CRM: A Key Issue in Today's Competitive Environment
María Rosa Llamas-Alonso (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and Ana Isabel Jiménez-Zarco (University of León, Spain)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-611-7.ch043
Abstract
As competition and the cost of acquiring new customers continue to increase, the need to build and enhance customer relationships has become paramount for businesses. The building of strong customer relationships has been suggested as a means for gaining competitive advantage (Mckenna, 1993) so, in today’s marketplace, a growing number of firms seek to develop profound, close and long-lasting relationships with their customers since it is much more profitable to keep and satisfy current customers than to manage an ever-changing customer portfolio (Reinartz & Kumar, 2003; Ross, 2005; Llamas-Alonso et al. 2009). This one is a consequence of many paradigmatical changes in the marketing field during the past decades, such as a transition from a focus on the product, transactional marketing, acquiring clients (responsive marketing approach) and market share towards a customer centric approach, relationship marketing, two-way communication, retaining customers (proactive and holistic marketing approaches) and share of customer. Thus, in this fastmoving and highly competitive scenario Customer Relationship Management (hereafter referred to as CRM) emerges as a business philosophy devoted to enhance customer relationships and consequently create value for both the company and the customer.