Knowledge Enabled Customer Relationship Management

The redesign of business processes and the implementation of standard software for enterprise resource planning (ERP) in recent years has led to significant improvements in both process performance and service quality (cf. Chap. 2.3.1). Now that the classic reengineering trend is slowing down, companies have come to realize that efficiency in itself is no longer sufficient if they are to compete for customers in the 21st century. In many markets we are currently witnessing a major move away from market and product centricity towards a complete realignment of business processes in order to integrate with customer processes, which creates additional customer values and finally leads to lasting customer relations. The efforts directed at building and maintaining long-term relationships with customers are usually summarized as ‘customer relationship management (CRM)’. CRM represents one of the networking strategies in Business Networking (cf. Chap. 4.3.3) and is driven by both business and technology: