Customer Relationship Management: A Strategic Imperative in the World of E-Business

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is shorthand for getting to know
your customers. Such beautiful simplicity, unfortunately, is absent from
this wordy work. Here CRM is defined as “disintermediation”
(preferably technologically enabled), meaning telemarketing and Web
pages. Whatever the language used along the way—channel strategy,
churn model, market-intelligent enterprise—the book is dedicated to
increasing the one term all businesspeople understand: wallet share.

Most of the CRM strategies proposed spring from an information-rich
platform. Having the right data to analyze and letting the analyses
drive the marketing campaign will lead to a competitive edge. It’s
called using customer information “at a granular level,” and this
book shows that “data mining” is the essential backdrop for customer
service strategies in an e-business world.

Brown’s style could be more inspiring. Definitely less pomposity
would have been nice. Yet the meat is there, under the verbosity. Brown
and his colleagues may not understand writing but they know all about
money and where it comes from. If your business wants a greater share,
take a double dose of patience pills and wade in.