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Managing Customer Relationships

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Managing Customer Relationships

A Strategic Framework

Wiley,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Text available

What's inside?

Identify, differentiate among, interact with and customize for each customer - or, just the ones you want to keep.

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

This very extensive text on customer relationship management leaves nothing unsaid or unexplained. Authors and editors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers tackle the subject with admirable organization, clarity and depth. They define every important term and do not lose the reader in marketing jargon - a rare virtue in a book about marketing. The text, including contributions from other well-known experts in the field, propounds a well-developed theory of customer relationship management (CRM) and sets out numerous examples to illustrate, explain and clarify the theory. Useful as a handbook, textbook or reference manual, the book covers - among many other core subjects - customer identification and differentiation, customer feedback, an analysis of retailing and basic tools for CRM. getAbstract.com highly recommends this book to service-oriented managers and executives. To form profitable relationships with your customers, first get friendly with Peppers and Rogers.

Summary

Why Customer Relationship Management

Customers aren't what they used to be. In the past, customers were mysterious entities who clumped together in relatively undifferentiated segments. To understand customers, many enterprises used statistical sampling techniques. However, the information such sampling obtained was of quite debatable worth and, in any event, often came as something of an afterthought. Strange as it seems today, during most of the twentieth century businesses did not organize themselves to meet the needs of customers. Instead they typically organized themselves to meet the needs of products. The Industrial Age was all about mass-producing products to meet an apparently insatiable demand. Management's lodestars were production efficiency, quality and price.

In the early stages of industrial development, this made sense. The product-hungry market seized any reasonably reliable mechanization that made it possible to economize on a costly job, any labor saving convenience or any cost cutting device. Therefore, the name of the game was to produce as much as possible as economically as possible. But as time went on, three consequences of this process made...

About the Authors

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are founding partners of the Peppers and Rogers Group, a Carlson Marketing Group Company based in Norwalk, Connecticut. They are the co-authors of five bestselling books about one-to-one customer relationships and were named by Business 2.0 magazine as two of the most important business gurus of all time.

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