A Multi-Stage Model for the Success of CRM
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Lee In-Ku 
Published: June 2018

As business environment has been more complex and globalized it has become necessary for the firms to manage their customer relationship more effectively. Customer Relationship Management(CRM) is a business activity which supports relationship marketing through the analysis of the lifetime value of certain selective customers by allowing long term consumer relationship in order to improve profitability. Accordingly, CRM system should be planned to assist the consumer related marketing activity of a firm through the integration and analysis of customer related information.
Started from total solution companies in late 1990's, many firms have been trying to introduce CRM on the emphasis of its benefits. Implementation of CRM system cost a lot to the firms at the first stage, as they tried to introduce all the functions of CRM at once. Whereas the advent of SaaS (Software as a Service) which provides CRM service via web site allows most companies to purchase the amount of service they need and helps to cut major cost burden nowadays. However, the unexpected disappointing outcome of these companies provokes negative perspective toward CRM.
Precedented studies regarding CRM mostly have focused on clarifying the key success factors through case studies in a certain industry and providing methods to build system in terms of information technology. Most researches have overlooked the actual strategic way of applying gathered information under a specific circumstance. The corresponding thesis describes multi-stage model for CRM and principles for success at each stage through the analysis of former studies in order to help the introduction of CRM to the companies.
When demand exceeds supply mass marketing activity concentrating on new customers is necessary for the profit maximization. While relationship marketing activity focusing on customer retention and CRM is crucial under oversupply in most cases. This evolution of marketing concept causes the firms to emphasize the importance of CRM for profit maximization more than ever.
Multi-stage model offered in this study consists of preliminary stage, system building stage and relationship marketing strategy stage and sixteen principles in total which should be obeyed at each stage for success. Preliminary stage breaks down into two different stages of firm selection and product/market selection in order to find out adequate companies for CRM system introduction. Five principles for success are provided at this stage. System building stage consists of technological success stage for system development and information extraction and operational success stage and seven principles are provided. Finally, relationship marketing strategy stage is the stage of applying CRM system for customer retention and it provides four principles for success. most of past researches focused on the design of system building stage rather than utilization stage, irrespective of approaching types. it caused the high cost and poor performances in many companies. The corresponding model offers the methods to minimize the unnecessary waste of resources and conflicts, and improve the performance of the firm by adding validity of introduction and utilization of the model.
The corresponding study offers an inclusive model globally applicable across all industries according to the theoretical approach based on existing researches. It eliminates the major limitation of actual applicability of the former studies focusing on a specific industry and improves practical usefulness of the model in the real business world. However this theoretic model has not been proved yet through actual data. Verification of the model based on the data gathered from various industries is therefore required in the future studies.