Problems and benefits of implementing Customer Relationship Management Essay

Problems and benefits of implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in relation to BT (British Telecom) - Essay Example In this essays, I will critically analyze the concept of customer relationship managament and emphasie its importance in regular operations of the organization. The case of British Telcom will be used in order to prove the evidence of provided research and theory. Beginning in the late 1980s, there has been a great deal of research on what exactly customer relationship management means and on what exactly a firm should be doing to implement such an orientation. Information technology offered firms a way to obtain, process, and use individual customer information so that firms would be able to personalize customer experiences. Some scholars have called it â€Å"market orientation.† (Armstrong, Cowan, Vickers, 2005:195 )One set of researchers suggested that customer orientation is a subset of market orientation. Their definition for market orientation is â€Å"the set of cross-functional processes and activities directed at creating and satisfying customers through continuous needs-assessment.† ( John, 2003: 11). Following their lead, market orientation has been treated as being composed of three components: customer orientation, competitor orientation, and interfunctional coordination. Can the terms customer orientation and market orientation be used interchangeably? If we accept the definition of a â€Å"market† (Ennew, Binks, 2003:220) as being a set of potential customers and treat the terms market and customer as synonymous except for the level of aggregation in numbers, then we can use the terms interchangeably. Such an argument does not necessarily negate the three-component structure of the concept of customer focus. To be truly customer focused, the firm has to be driven by the goal of providing the customer with the high-est level of satisfaction. This implies that the firm concentrates on how the customer is better served (by the firm) compared to the competitive offerings and that all processes and activities in the entire firm are integrated