Customer Relationship Management: One European Bank's Experiences

Businesses across all sectors, it has been argued, will have to change their approach to marketing, which should now be carried out through relationships, networks, and interactions. This article is about customer relationship management (CRM), which seeks to establish closer relationships and interactions between a business and its most important customers. Our literature review shows that although the promises of how CRM can improve the performance of a business are many, the practical guidelines on how to design and implement CRM successfully are few, and that, as a result of this, practitioners have been struggling. The present article addresses the problem by way of discussing a CRM program that one European bank recently designed and implemented and, in doing so, the article adds empirical evidence to what constitutes good CRM practice. We employed the case study method since this research method is particularly useful for probing questions such as 'how' type questions. The CRM program is described in detail, and includes an implementation procedure consisting of 18 actions grouped in five large categories that each has an impact on the different business units and IT systems. Shortcomings of the CRM program are considered, and avenues for future research are suggested.