The state of CRM adoption by the financial services in the UK: an empirical investigation

In recent years, organisations have begun to realise the importance of knowing their customers better. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing customer related knowledge of increasing strategic significance. The successful adoption of IT-enabled CRM redefines the traditional models of interaction between businesses and their customers, both nationally and globally. It is regarded as a source for competitive advantage because it enables organisations to explore and use knowledge of their customers and to foster profitable and long-lasting one-to-one relationships. This paper discusses the results of an exploratory survey conducted in the UK financial services sector; it discusses CRM practice and expectations, the motives for implementing it, and evaluates post-implementation experiences. It also investigates the CRM tools functionality in the strategic, process, communication, and business-to-customer (B2C) organisational context and reports the extent of their use. The results show that despite the anticipated potential, the benefits from such tools are rather small. # 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.