Customer Relationship Management : Concept, Strategy, and Tools

Customer relationship management (CRM) as a strategy and as a technology has gone through an amazing evolutionary journey. The initial technological approach was followed by many disappointing initiatives only to see the maturing of the underlying concepts and applications in recent years. Today, CRM represents a strategy, a set of tactics, and a technology that have become indispensible in the modern economy.

This book presents an extensive treatment of the strategic and tactical aspects of customer relationship management as we know it today. It stresses developing an understanding of economic customer value as the guiding concept for marketing decisions. The goal of the book is to serve as a comprehensive and up-to-date learning companion for advanced undergraduate students, master's degree students, and executives who want a detailed and conceptually sound insight into the field of CRM.

Dr. V Kumar is the Richard and Susan Lenny Distinguished Chair Professor in Marketing, the Executive Director of the Center for Excellence in Brand and Customer Management, and the Director of the PhD. Program in Marketing at the J. Mack Robinson School of Business, Georgia State University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. V Kumar’s pioneering research on Customer Loyalty and Customer Lifetime Value has received broad attention. He was recently ranked as one of the top five scholars in marketing worldwide. Dr. Kumar has published over 160 articles in the form of journal papers, books (translated into six languages worldwide) and book chapters, conference proceedings, research reports, and case studies. His research has been widely published in premier journals such as Journal of Marketing, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Operations Research. He is the recipient of seven Lifetime Achievement Awards in Marketing, and is author/co-author of 9 Best Paper Awards in premier journals.Dr. Kumar serves on Editorial Review Boards of 12 scholarly journals and on several academic and corporate boards, as well as as a as a consultant for leading Fortune 500 corporations. He has taught over 24 courses across Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral programs in over 30 countries and is the recipient of eleven Teaching Excellence Awards.

Werner Reinartz is a Professor of Marketing at the University of Cologne, Germany. Previously, he was the Cora Chaired Professor of Retailing and Management and Associate Professor of Marketing at INSEAD, France. His research interest and expertise focuses on the subjects of customer management, services, and retailing. In terms of research productivity, he has been rated among the top 2.5% of scholars in the world in terms of time‐adjusted publication rate in the top four journals in the marketing discipline His work in these domains has been recognized with major academic awards. He has published extensively in journals such as Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing, International Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Service Research. In addition, his research was presented in four different feature articles in Harvard Business Review. He is an area editor of International Journal of Research in Marketing and a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing and Marketing Science. Professor Reinartz has worked with a large number of international companies and has conducted extensively executive training programs for many Fortune500 and EuroStoxx50 companies. Professor Reinartz holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Houston (1999).