Customer relationship management in practice – A qualitative study

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study into the implementation of data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. Seventeen companies are investigated and three short case studies are presented. It is found that clean customer data are essential to successful CRM performance and that technological support for data acquisition, analysis and deployment are not widespread. Clean customer data enable CRM strategies to be both more effective and more efficient, yet not all companies are investing in improving data quality.