In recent years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has emerged as one of the most widely prescribed solutions for diminishing market share and sluggish growth of many industries, particularly the banking and financial services sector. Recent market analysis suggest that the CRM software market is growing at an astronomical pace (700%) and is estimated to have generated $3 bn by the end 2004. The basic concept of CRM, however, is not new to the business. The history of the modern avtar of CRM goes back to a seminal work by Ted Levitt in the late 1960s.
The cornerstone of his argument is that the purpose of the business is to “create and keep a customer” and it should “view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs.” Nearly four decades later, modern business is realizing it in an effort to become a customer-centric operation across the globe.The financial services industry being a forerunner in embracing leading-edge technology also sets the pace in CRM. The box shows a few examples from the global banking institution, who have developed CRM systems in recent times. However, in the Indian scenario, CRM is often rejected as a too complex and expensive piece of fancy software. It did not matter until now. Indian banks have been comfortably wrapped in the protective cocoons of regulation for many decades.
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