Customer relationship management: a look at incentive programmes and their usefulness in selected service firms

A total of six organisations within the service industry and regionally headquartered in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area were investigated to study how they strategically leverage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) related concepts in order to attract and retain customers. As evident from the case studies, those companies that have a fixation on technology and did not paid attention to the features and service that customers wanted were in risk of reduced profits and market share. It was found that by maintaining and improving customer and employee loyalty, generating a positive attitude in terms of its culture, maintaining direct communication with customers through newsletters and other forms, leveraging logistics and trade discounts, allowing Knowledge Management (KM) related initiatives and strategies to prevail in its operations, using programmes that highlight their different customers through making reasonable attempts to adapt to customers' changing wants and needs, firms tend to be successful. CRM-related systems and the proper incentives offered to organisations' internal customer, namely employees, have allowed firms to leverage CRM to further differentiate themselves from their competition and ultimately enhance both customer and employee satisfaction.