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Comprehensive, practical, logical…

…but not ground-breaking or questioning

Is there really a ‘virtuous circle’ of relationships?

Reviews ‘Up Close and Personal’? Customer relationship marketing @ work Paul R. Gamble, Merlin Stone and Neil Woodcock Kogan Page; 1999; ISBN 0-74-943087-7; 341pp; £24.95 This is a comprehensive book that builds systematically and, above all else, comprehensively on the earlier work of Merlin Stone and his coauthors on customer relationship management. As the title implies, as well as marshalling the arguments to convince us that we need to practise customer relationship management (as opposed, for example, to transactional marketing), the book also includes a great deal of material on the practical side of how you make CRM a central part of business processes. The book is very practical, logically organised, well written and includes plenty of up-to-date case-study examples to illustrate the dos and don’ts of CRM. These case studies covered a range of sectors and marketing issues, including financial services, the British retail clothing market, Orange mobile phones and revenue defence. I really enjoyed these; they were highly instructive and I would have appreciated even more of them. All in all, if you are relatively new to the CRM idea and you basically want to be convinced that it is a ‘good thing’, this is as admirable a book as any you will find to fit that bill. However, in the strengths of the book lie potential weaknesses so far as some readers may be concerned. For example, the emphasis on the practical means that the book reads at times like a general management text rather than an attempt to break new ground in thinking about CRM. Readers who are generally experienced managers may find that around half of the book seems pretty familiar to them. They may not need this book to tell them that organisations have to be persuaded to ‘buy in’ to any new practice or philosophy, including CRM. Similarly, they will probably be aware that every business process should have its KPIs (key performance indicators) against which it can be held accountable. More seriously, the book seems to me to be written by evangelists for a cause rather than healthily sceptical analysts. If you want a more questioning approach, you will not like this book. For the sceptic (including me) there are too many unquestioned articles of faith in the CRM movement, and this book does too little to scrutinise them. For example, it is an article of faith that there is a relationship ‘virtuous circle’. Have good relationships with (and high levels of loyalty from) your customers and you are also likely to have good relationships with your shareholders and employees. This seems to be to be stated so frequently as a necessary truth by CRM and loyalty enthusiasts that it has become axiomatic to their arguments. But is it really the case? Is it not just as likely that there will be a trade-off in satisfying each of these parties as that there will be synergy? Consider the privatised utilities. Thanks to the visibility