Towards developing a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy for supporting pre-implementation activities in business

Effectively preparing and planning for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy is critical to
CRM implementation success. A lack of a common and systematic way to implement CRM means that
focus must be placed on the pre-implementation stage to ensure chance of success. Although existing CRM
implementation approaches evidence the need to concentrate mostly on the pre-implementation stage, they
fail to address some key issues, which raises the need for a generic framework that address CRM strategy
analysis. This paper proposes a framework to support effective CRM pre-implementation strategy
development. In section 1 we provide a brief background concerning CRM implementation. In section 2 we
justify the need to ensure a strategic focus during CRM implementation. In section 3 we describe a range of
existing CRM implementation frameworks, and consider the relative advantages and deficiencies of each. In
section 4 we justify the need for an adopted approach, which we describe in section 5; focusing primarily on
the issues of strategy. In section 6, we provide a conclusion to our work, summarising the contributions of
proposed framework.