Modelling CRM in the social media age

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a concept that is as old as business (Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995b; Drucker, 1954; Payne and Frow, 2006). CRM is often confused with relationship marketing, and in actual fact there appears to be no general consensus on the difference between these two phenomena in previous literature (Parvitiyar and Sheth, 2001). However, the best differentiation may be that, where relationship marketing is concerned with managing relationships with multiple stakeholders, CRM is concerned with managing the most important relationship; that with the customer (Ryals and Payne, 2001; Chen and Ching, 2007).What is certain is that CRM is a critical research domain (Boulding et al., 2005; Kumar et al., 2006; Cooper et al., 2008; Verhoef et al., 2010). Its importance is only increasing as more and more enabling technologies are available to businesses. This paper seeks to conceptualise CRM in an age where digital and social technologies are prominent and disruptive marketing tools. First though, CRM is defined as ‘the cross-functional integration of processes, people, operations, and marketing capabilities that is enabled through information, technology and applications’ (Payne and Frow, 2005:168)