Managing customer relationship

The paper points out the key market changes in the first decades of the twenty-first century and their implications on business philosophy, concepts, principles and techniques of relationship marketing from the point of making strategic marketing decisions. In that context points are made to the important role of developing customer relationship management (CRM), highlighting the effectiveness of a combination of the CRM and the customer experience management (CEM) models. One of the important aspects of that relationship is reflected in the fact that CRM tells us what the customer has done, whereas CEM can tell us why he/she has done it. Consequently, CEM can vastly improve the power of CRM to predict future customer behaviour. Successful implementation of CRM concepts implies: excellent understanding of the field of activity and competition; knowledge of customers; market-oriented thinking; an integrated approach to managing channels of communication and sales; and finally, a database development. In this paper we have also presented the CRM value chain as a model which businesses can follow when developing and implementing their CRM strategies and the related CRM diamond model, based on strong theoretical principles and practical requirements of business