Critical issues in CRM adoption and implementation

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a fast growing category of application software. CRM is gaining interest because of its focus on the customer and thus its potential for increasing revenue. It enhances the ability of a firm to compete and to retain key customers. Furthermore, given the rapid growth of e-business applications and the increasing need to sell to and support customers through the web, CRM provides a focal point for all customer-facing activities. This review of CRM product capabilities and key CRM vendors identifies three distinct categories of CRM vendors and finds that they are attempting to offer a rich or full set of CRM features and are rapidly integrating web access into their products. The study proposes a model to aid in the selection of CRM products and the evaluation of CRM vendors.