The Goals of Customer Relationship Management

The present article proposes that the variety of existing managerial practices collectively described as “customer relationship management” can be organized and coordinated into a logical sequence of goals and methods that is more effective than performing them in an uncoordinated fashion. The model proposes that managers have five distinct but interrelated goals: customer acquisition, customer retention, customer development, customer consultation, and customer conversion. Although each goal can be achieved using distinct and well-known marketing practices, the model integrates the practices in a temporal and logical order in which achieving one goal contributes to achieving other goals. Integrating the procedures and technologies used at each stage results is a synergistic effort that should benefit companies and can guide empirical research.