ABSTRACT
Introduction The expression customer relationship management (CRM) has only been in use since the early 1990s. Since then there have been many attempts to defi ne the domain of CRM, a number of which appear in Table 1.1 . As a relatively immature business or organizational practice, a consensus has not yet emerged about what counts as CRM. Even the meaning of the three-letter acronym CRM is contested. For example, although most people would understand that CRM means customer relationship management, others have used the acronym to mean customer relationship marketing. 1
Information technology (IT) companies have tended to use the term CRM to describe the software applications that automate the marketing, selling and service functions of businesses. This equates CRM with technology. Although the market for CRM software is now populated with many players, it started in 1993 when Tom Siebel founded Siebel Systems Inc. Use of the term CRM can be traced back to that period. Forrester, the technology research organization, estimates that worldwide spending on CRM technologies will reach US$11 billion per annum by 2010.2 Others with a managerial rather than technological emphasis, claim that CRM is a disciplined approach to developing and maintaining profi table customer relationships, and that technology may or may not have a role.
