CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A REVIEW

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) has drawn great attention across research areas. However, little effort has been made to reveal and evaluate new changes relating to customer relationship management (CRM) in the 21st century. Therefore, to address this gap, the paper adopts the literature analysis method to review 37 studies, published from 2010-2021. The results show that the interest of the scholars during this time focuses on the combination of information technology (IT) and customer relationship management (CRM) in terms of electronic CRM (e-CRM) or social CRM (s-CRM) to improve firms’ performance in terms of marketing, finance, supply chain and so forth. The sectors of services and commerce (i.e., insurance, service, retail, and bank) also draw attention to the research of customer relationship management (CRM). However, there are few studies that focus on the theoretical perspective, relative to CRM in the 21st century as well as the attention of internal customer relationship management or the adoption of 4.0 technology in CRM. The paper is expected to provide an overview of the current stage of research on Customer relationship management (CRM). Meanwhile, it also offers recommendations for future research.