A Four-Step Method for the Selection of CRM Software Packages

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are growing in importance as essential tools to exploit such data, enhancing sales, productivity, and customer satisfaction, becoming the foundation of contemporary marketing strategy. Its purpose is to personalize a business relationship, whether it’s B2B or B2C, in hopes that this personalized and strategic touch will result in more business. However, existing CRM selection methods suffer from several limitations, which make their actual implementation often impractical. Therefore, this article proposes a novel method to support firms in the selection of the most appropriate CRM according to their needs. The proposed method resorts to the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to classify the most relevant criteria for the focal firm's needs and to fuzzy AHP (FAHP) to identify the most suitable alternative. An illustrative implementation of the method is also presented in the article as the case study. Furthermore, we show how the method can be straightforwardly adapted to various circumstances and discuss its implementation in SME.