Crm Technologies as a Leverage of Competitiveness and Business Value Creation in European Markets : A Comparison between Italy and the Netherlands

The term CRM, Customer Relationship Management, is one of the most applied concept both in Marketing and IT literature and applications. CRM is most of the time used as a replacement of a misleading narrow term: Relationship Management (RM). Operations, Customer Service, Sales, human resources, credit controls are essential ingredients in the customer satisfaction blender. We can conclude that the definition of CRM is also its objective: The development and maintenance of mutually beneficial long-term relationships with strategically significant customers. All this focus on customers and their needs comes from a shift from a mass marketing approach, through market segmentation, to an individualized marketing. This one-to-one marketing strategy is connected also with a more and more delocalized access to the markets from the logistics and distribution partners that implicates much more real-time expectations of the customers. So the market started to move from a product oriented structure to a customer oriented one but, unfortunately not all the companies haven't adapted their organization to the new requests of the new "customer centric era"