The importance of customer relationship management as source of competitive advantages has been recognized for decades (McKenna, 1993; Woodcock, 2000), nevertheless, it has been in recent years, with the deployment of the information technologies, when CRM has gained growing popularity. | HOW TO MEASURE THE IMPACT OF A CRM STRATEGY ON THE FIRM PERFORMANCE M. Rosa Llamas and M. Aránzazu Sulé Área de Comercialización e Investigación de Mercados Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales Universidad de León Campus de Vegazana s n 24071 León Spain M. Rosa Llamas e-mail dderla@ Tl 34 987 291455 Fax 34 987 291454 M. Aránzazu Sulé e-mail ddeasa@ Tl 34 987 291000 Ext. 5451 Fax 34 987 291454 1 HOW TO MEASURE THE IMPACT OF A CRM STRATEGY ON THE FIRM PERFORMANCE ABSTRACT CRM strategy Customer Relationship Management is a business philosophy stemming from Relationship Marketing that joins strategy and technology with the aim of creating value for both customers and the company. In this paper we justify the interest of establishing a formal system to measure CRM performance. In order to do that we first focus on the role of marketing performance measurement throughout the time. Then we compare different frameworks and metrics used to measure performance in the CRM era. Finally challenges to face in CRM performance measurement as well as some ideas for future research are discussed. Keywords CRM marketing performance measurement. 1. INTRODUCTION The importance of customer relationship management as source of competitive advantages has been recognized for decades McKenna 1993 Woodcock 2000 nevertheless it has been in recent years with the deployment of the information technologies when CRM has gained growing popularity. This business philosophy combines strategy and technology with the aim of get to know the customer and establishing a two-way communication and interaction in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes increasing the value for both customer and company. There are three issues underlying the RM concept relationships networks and interaction Gummesson 2002 . Srivastava Shervani and Fahey 1999 in a special number of the Journal of Marketing entitled Fundamental issues and directions for .
