Clearly - Economist Intelligence Unit - Improving Customer Relationships An Integrated Approach

Over the past few decades, technology has advanced dramatically to help firms to improve the organisation and management of important customer data.

Software suites have flooded the market, promising to help companies to track sales, log customer interactions and even notify sales agents of cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.

Yet for all their trumpeting of the importance of customer satisfaction, most companies still struggle to come to grips with their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

This paper aims to understand better the current state of enterprise CRM initiatives, the obstacles and challenges that companies experience in formulating and executing strategies, and how firms expect these initiatives to play out over the next three years. The major findings are as follows...