Thesis (PhD (Business Management))--University of Stellenbosch, 2010. / Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not a new topic, but the advent of technology based CRM solutions has enabled companies to deal better on an individual level and more efficiently with their large customer base. Seeing the benefits of this competitive advantage many companies have implemented a CRM solution but with the result that many of them have failed to be successful. The problem is that these companies often do not know why they were not successful and other companies will make the same mistakes if these failures are not recognized. There is a great deal of literature and research analysing this phenomenon but they all focus mainly on detailed CRM issues and how they could be performed better. They do not take into account that CRM is a complex topic and that many reasons for failure interact with each other. Based on the need of many companies to implement CRM, the goal of this research is to provide a CRM insight perspective and a strategy to implement CRM more successfully. In contrast to existing CRM research, this study investigates twenty-one reasons for CRM failure in three knowledge areas and explains why each one could threaten the success of a CRM implementation. The first area determines the danger of every risk based on the likelihood of appearance and its potential to fail the complete CRM solution. The second area identifies when these risks are most likely to appear for the first time during a CRM project life cycle. The third area examines all relationships between the twenty-one CRM risks and how they influence each other. It is concluded that every CRM implementation approach will fail to be successful when problems are only addressed once they become visible. It is not possible to solve every CRM problem at the moment it appears. Many issues during the implementation of CRM have to be met before they become a problem because they influence each other and lead to barriers that could result in a complete CRM failure. Based on this perception and the research findings, which included 106 of the top 500 companies worldwide, this study develops a CRM strategy framework including a systemic CRM perspective for businesses.

M.Phil. (Engineering Management) / For over a decade, customer satisfaction has received increasing attention in marketing. Customer satisfaction is related to loyalty, which in tum is linked to increased profitability, market share, growth, and decreased costs.8 During the 1980s, Japanese firms won major market shares with their product quality and speed. As most leading western companies caught up with their Japanese competitors on quality, most Japanese firms were focusing on a new strategy to meet and exceed changing customer expectations in the 1990s.1 To produce loyalty to an organization became one of the most popular marketing trends of the last decade.1·32 However, customers remain loyal only as long as they are completely satisfied with the quality of the service or product provided? Research results show that it costs five to seven times more to recruit a new customer than it does to retain one." Numerous research studies have shown that the average customer who is happy with a product and a service tells at least three people of his satisfaction, while a dissatisfied customer tells 9 or 10 people about his dissatisfactionf Knowledge of customers' perceptions and attitudes about an organization's business will greatly enhance its opportunity to make better business decisions." More than 80 percent of innovations in high-performing companies come from customers' ideas.'