The CRM Value Chain: An Overview

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been around for over thirty years, but there’s still widespread misunderstanding about what it is. That is partly due to competing perspectives – tech firms tend to equate CRM with the applications and tools that help marketing, sales and service managers do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. Functional managers in marketing might view CRM as campaign management. Adding to the confusion is the fact that CRM is largely absent from business school curricula which continue to teach established subject matter. Every business school offers instruction in marketing, for example. The supporting literature, research evidence, and course materials are well proven and widely available. Not so for CRM, regrettably.

In this series of four articles, we present a new model of CRM, the CRM Value Chain (CRM VC). The model aims to demystify, characterise, and conceptualise CRM, and eliminate the confusion.