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What customer information should companies use for customer relationship management? Practical insights from empirical research

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Abstract

For the past decade, customer relationship management (CRM) has been one of the priorities in marketing research and practice. Hence, many companies have invested heavily in CRM systems that, unfortunately, did not meet their expectations. Because such shortcomings may have resulted from unrealistic expectations as well as inappropriate data input, this study provides insights into what companies may expect from CRM and what data they should use. Across the phases of the CRM process, the authors show which CRM objectives have been considered and which customer data have proven to be applicable in the empirical CRM literature. The results indicate that despite differences with respect to influence, a variety of customer data can be used to analyze CRM objectives throughout the entire customer life cycle. Overall, the study provides researchers with a comprehensive review of the empirical research on CRM and offers practitioners insights on the scope of CRM analyses and the applicability of customer data for CRM.

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Notes

  1. To understand the practical problems with CRM implementations, we conducted fifteen interviews with customer managers from telecommunication (T-Online), media (Gruner+Jahr, Burda, Springer), service (b+m Informatik), and retail companies (Otto, Manufaktum).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ipsos GmbH, Sachsenstraße 6, 20097, Hamburg, Germany

    Kerstin Reimer

  2. Kühne Logistics University, Großer Grasbrook 17, 20457, Hamburg, Germany

    Jan U. Becker

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  1. Kerstin Reimer
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  2. Jan U. Becker
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Correspondence to Jan U. Becker.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 2 Operationalization and data origin in the initiation phase
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Appendix 2

Table 3 Operationalization and data origin in the maintenance phase
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Appendix 3

Table 4 Operationalization and data origin in the termination phase
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Reimer, K., Becker, J.U. What customer information should companies use for customer relationship management? Practical insights from empirical research. Manag Rev Q 65, 149–182 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-014-0110-z

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