The CRM process and the banking industry: Insights from the marketing literature

This chapter's aim is to synthesize and present insights relevant to CRM process implementation in retail banking drawn from the marketing research literature. The authors first summarize strategic concepts from the marketing discipline that they believe are fundamental to the CRM process, but appear to be frequently forgotten in actual implementations that focus on the enabling technologies. They then describe a comprehensive framework for conceptualizing, operationalizing, and measuring CRM process implementation and its impact on firm performance, and illustrate its use to identify activities that must be performed for successful CRM in the context of a published case study of CRM implementation at a European Bank. Subsequently, the authors summarize research in one area of great importance to CRM managers at banks, namely, customer response to self-service banking technologies. The chapter concludes with some interesting directions for future research drawn from recent work in the marketing research literature.