Between April and June 2002,
the STAR project has conducted interviews with 69 major companies
providing retail, financial, travel and other services to European
customers. The aim was to assess the current state of eCRM development,
identifying emerging opportunities for its productive use, and
to evaluate its organisational and employment impacts. The Internet
and other ICTs, in fact, offer extraordinary opportunities for
innovation in customer relationship management. For businesses,
eCRM provides new ways to recruit customers and retain their
loyalty, to customise services and provide personalised products
and services, to identify emerging patterns of demand in style
and to enhance links with suppliers to meet these demands.
The main findings of this field
research have been analysed in five reports. Two of them are
already available for downloading on the STAR web site, while
the others will be published in December 2002.
The first report available
on the STAR web site is entitled "Employment Implications
of Electronic Customer Relationship Management" and is aimed
at analysing the impact of the introduction of electronic customer
relationship management on work content, skill requirements and
employment levels.
The second one, "Emerging
Trends in Customer Relation Management Using ICT: the Travel
Industry", provides an overview of the use of ICTs in the
organisation and management of customer relations in the travel
industry. In this sector, in fact, the Internet is gradually
gaining ground as a distribution channel that offers direct and
interactive communication with final customers and allows for
more targeted distribution of information at a lower cost. At
the same time, it offers suppliers in the industry the potential
to by-pass intermediaries in the value-chain and thus increases
their revenue base. These trends call for new business models
to be developed by travel and tourism companies for managing
their relationships with intermediaries and final customers.
As for all STAR reports, they
are available for free downloading upon registration. The executive
summary, instead, is available directly online (http://www.databank.it/star).
Should you have any problems
with the downloading or need any further information, please
do not hesitate to contact the STAR project consortium(star@dbcons.it).
STAR Project Email contact:
star@dbcons.it
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