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Currently in modern business environments and challenging scenarios, the emphasis on maintaining customers has been regarded as the key strategy that shapes all marketing programs. In relation to that, customer relationship management (CRM) has emerged as a crucial marketing strategy for achieving business objectives (Karakostas, Kardaras, & Papathanassiou, 2005). Heinrich (2005) indicated that building successful customer relationships enables an organization to improve its business portfolio and face the intense competition which arises from local and international rivals. The idea about CRM has basically emerged from theory of relationship marketing which can be conceptualized as the process of building, improving, and continuously maintaining successful relational exchanges with customers in an attempt to achieve the desired performance outcomes (Palmatier, 2008). Sin, Tse, and Yim (2005) conceptualized CRM as a comprehensive process and strategy which is basically designed to help an organization in identifying, obtaining, maintaining, and nurturing profitable customer relationships. The key principle of CRM is centered on knowing and providing better customer value than competitors through the integration of process, technology, and individuals in the value chain activities. In general, CRM represents an essential organizational process which provides an organization with a greater capability to build long term customer relationships and keep their values on the long term (Srivastava, Shervani, & Fahey 1999).
Knowing how organizations can benefit from building successful customer relationships is very necessary for both scholars and marketing managers (Payne & Frow 2005). Past studies thought about customer relationship management as profoundly reforming the area of marketing and emerging as a component of the new prevailing logics of marketing (Bolton, 2004; Buttle & Maklan, 2019). Researchers have declared that when an organization focuses on leveraging profitable customer relationships, it will have greater abilities to build and sustain its competitiveness in highly dynamic markets (Mithas, Krishnan, & Fornell, 2005; Ryals, 2005). Moreover, Payne and Frow (2005) suggested that, “CRM provides enhanced opportunities to use data and information to both understand customers and co-create value with them. This requires a cross-functional integration of processes, people, operations, and marketing capabilities that is enabled through information, technology, and applications.” For that reason, accumulating the feedback of customers through the acquisition of important data and using it in the CRM system enables an organization to obtain in-depth information about customers’ needs and expectations. These insights represent a valuable approach for identifying existing issues and developing organizational products or services to satisfy such needs.