Draw The Contours

Implementation of the 6 Cs framework will bring companies closer to achieving the goal of keeping customers for life.

- Dr Alok Kumar Rai

The prevailing practices and ever-increasing acceptance across modern businesses have established and validated the credit due to the potential of customer relationship management (CRM) in ensuring growth, profitability, and competitive success of businesses at modern marketplace. The cliché of ‘customer is the king’ has long lost its solemnity with companies moving from market share model to wallet share model and mastering the art of manoeuvering customer consumption behaviours and beliefs. However, with the new generation of aware, alert, and adept customers, companies have been finding it hard to please and persuade people with the best of offerings. The nature and structure of CRM as a ‘strategic process’ has been contemplated upon in industry as well as academia. Numerous research studies in this field have focused on the various aspects of CRM based on its technical as well strategic orientation. The principal peril of CRM has been that it grossly lacked a universally acceptable implementation framework.

CRM implementation: the underlying dilemma