Customer Relationship Management, 1st Edition by Pearson

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CRM as an integral business strategy

Strategy is a topic that can be approached in different ways (De Wit and Meyer, 2004). It can imply the discussion of the ‘organisational purpose’: what is the company’s raison d’être? Why do we exist; how do we contribute to our stakeholders? But at the same time it can be a coherent, unambiguous and integral pattern of decisions, the outcome of the analysis of opportunities and threats in the business domain and the wider environment and the competencies of the organisation. These decisions address not only what the organisation aims for, but also how it wants to achieve its goals.

In the context of CRM strategy we will follow Treacy and Wiersema (1996). In their study they identified what they call three ...