Introduction

The emergence of the Internet has reduced time and distance to almost zero; customer expectations have risen to an all time high. The balance of power has shifted from supplier to the customer. It is the customer that now decides who, where, when and what to buy and more aptly determining at what price.

It has become glaringly clear the only way for businesses to sustain their competitive edge is by providing a high level quality based customer relationship. Consideration for deploying customer relationship as an integral part of corporate business strategy has now become mandatory and is no longer an option.

Studies have shown keeping existing customer loyalty will provide two-to-three times more repeat business. This has further been augmented by proven statistics the cost of acquiring new customers can cost as much as six times more compared to keeping an existing customer. Ultimately, customer

loyalty will strengthen your market position, by keeping these customers away from your competitors, thus resulting in making your products and/or services less price sensitive.

In the 21st century the name of the game is to be competitive, make no mistake, this in turn can be described as; capturing the most market share in the shortest period of time, utilising the fewest resources for the sake of driving revenue, and generating as much revenue as possible, as profitably as you can. The more revenue an organisation can earn should ultimately deliver more market share, which in turn should deliver competitiveness. As an integral part of your corporate business strategy should be the growth of substantial profitable revenue coupled with customer loyalty.

To facilitate customer loyalty and planning for substantial profitable revenue, companies must adapt an enterprise wide process for consistently managing customer interactions. One of the most popular business trends today allowing us to achieve this has been the introduction of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). What exactly is CRM? Simply, a CRM solution contains all the disparate pieces of a company's customer-related information.

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