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Revision with unchanged content. Forward-looking organizations are investing in customer relationship management (CRM) technology to support the adoption of more customer centric strategies. Results have been mixed. The importance of CRM for the long term success of organizations, coupled with the skewed and incomplete understanding of it by industry, makes it a topic worthy of detailed investigation. Marketing academics too have investigated CRM from varying viewpoints and found that there has been little deliberate attempt to consolidate the conceptualizations into a holistic understanding. This is important given the nascent and evolving nature of CRM. This book takes a holistic look at the emerging issues and trends in CRM, including the effect of computer software and the accompanying new management processes on organizations, and the dynamics of the alignment of marketing, sales and services, and all other functions responsible for delivering customers a satisfying experience. In order to understand CRM better a content analysis of more than a hundred articles and documents from academic and industry sources was undertaken. Results show that there is a lack of holistic thinking and discussion of CRM in both academics and industry which is required to understand how the people, process, and technology in CRM impact each other to affect successful implementation.

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Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing and Finance, Western Illinois University.PhD in Business Administration from Florida International University. Worked in sales and marketing in mulitnational companies for 7 years.

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