Content area
Full Text
Introduction
While companies have more or less solved the problems concerning their back-end operations through the use of enterprise resource planning systems they now focus on improving their front-end operations towards enhancing the value they offer to their customers (business and consumers) through the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. There is, however, a strong debate both in the academic and in the business community concerning the discipline(s) or research domain(s) in which CRM actually belongs. Evidently, CRM is a multidisciplinary topic since it deals with marketing (e.g. relationship marketing, consumer behaviour, etc.), information systems (e.g. e-commerce, human computer interaction, etc.), management, etc. To that end, there is a clear need for researchers to work towards conceptualizing, defining, classifying and in general providing through a structured and documented manner all CRM's available research approaches.
Nevertheless, during the last ten years, a great number of articles related to e-CRM/CRM have been published. This body of international literature has been reviewed and classified into CRM research areas by several authors aiming to identify CRM conceptual models and frameworks. [292], [293] Romano and Fjermestad (2002, 2003) and [249] Ngai (2005) are among the first to review and classify the literature. However, in these older studies the articles reviewed were classified among predetermined CRM research areas, which leaves still unsolved the problem faced by the research community, namely to identify a conceptual and functional CRM framework unbiased (free of any assumption which cannot be verified in practice).
In the present paper, we follow a quite different approach for the identification of the CRM research areas. Specifically, we use as the sole criterion of classification the keywords reported in the articles (in fact keywords expressions) together with their frequencies. The authors' keywords are taken as an authentic indicator about the articles' subject areas. In this sense, the keywords are one of the most revealing characteristics about an article's content. Our approach finds support in a suggestion by Banville-Landry (1989) that is repeated in [292] Romano and Fjermestad (2002, p. 66): "What the research community says about itself should be taken into account when evaluating a field's maturity." Keywords are, in our view, the suitable way for doing that in a comprehensive manner.
[292] Romano and Fjermestad (2002, p. 82)...