Customer Relationship Management in Electronic Markets

Abstract

Customer relationship management, or CRM, has found increased attention in both the academic and managerial worlds of marketing in recent years. While the Internet has greatly enabled the application of CRM in fostering loyal customers, the preliminary results on the effectiveness and efficiency of technology-based CRM has been far from discouraging. The authors identify various contentious issues behind the various key concepts of relationship management and identify several areas that deserve closer academic scrutiny and managerial inspection. The paper also comments on the extent to which Internet technology can bring about closer relationships with a firm's customers.

Key Words:

• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• e-CRM
• electronic market relationships
• relationship marketing