Assessing customer relationship management strategies for creating competitive advantage in electronic business

Increasing numbers of e-businesses view customer relationships as a basis for achieving increased efficiency and leveraging a competitive advantage. The development of customer relationship management is as a result of the optimism expressed by many managers that technology could provide a mechanism for storing, retrieving and disseminating knowledge that adds value to both the customers and the organisation. However, since the late 1990s many industry and academic commentators have expressed disappointment in the returns that CRM was delivering. This article assesses the CRM driven strategies that firms have adopted in pursuit of competitive advantage and argues that only an integrated system that includes the whole enterprise is likely to maximise the potential of information technology in this context.