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1 Introduction
During the mass production age, the competition in the business world was about efficient production and capturing the new customers in the market. The 4P (product, price, place and promotion) was developed as a tool for marketing success and has been the unchallenged paradigm for marketing management ([23] Grönroos, 1989). But the changing environment, especially the energy crisis, progress in service industry and the focus on quality management, forced the companies to change their focus from customer acquisition to customer retention ([57] Sheth, 2002) by building relationships with customers and adding more value to goods and services ([43] Lindgreen and Wynstra, 2005).
In the late 1990s, customer relationship management (CRM) is formed as a popular business term, which holds the same roots with relationship marketing and enhances the paradigm with the emerging information technologies. Although the term is accepted in the professional area, there is confusion about the definitions of the term. In one of the enhanced studies, [68] Zablah et al. (2004) define five perspectives of CRM which are, strategy, process, capability, philosophy and technology. As a result of its complex structure, the positive financial return rates of CRM related projects vary from 10 to 30 percent ([7] Brewton and Schiemann, 2003; [36] Krol, 2002; [54] Richards and Jones, 2008). Besides, the low level of success rates, the experiences show that unsuccessful CRM implementations may lead to decrease in customer satisfaction (CS) and customer loyalty (CL) ([54] Richards and Jones, 2008).
As a result of the low success level of CRM, measurement models are proposed by both academicians and professionals. The mentioned frameworks can be classified in two groups: partial and holistic measurement models. Although the processes of a company are defined as one of the main components of CRM ([11] Chen and Popovich, 2003; [47] Mendoza et al. , 2007) the process level CRM measurement is not covered in the proposed models. While the partial measurement models do not mention the area, the holistic models cover CRM process to some degree. Thus, the aim of this paper is to define CRM processes and provide a tool that measures these processes within a company. In this manner the research is designed in accordance with the scale development literature. The study contains...