Firms are continually seeking new ways to forge close relationships with their most valuable customers. With recent advances in networking and database management, firms have both the motivation and the means for improving their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies.


This book focuses on the actuality of implementing CRM. It is about the organization's ability to provide a seamless and personalized experience to each customer rather than a transactional or product-focused approach where the future of the relationship is not an over-riding consideration. This book connects CRM systems implementation with organizational change for the first time. It looks into the factors that distinguish firms which connect with their customers and gain customer loyalty with firms that are not as successful. It also describes the micro-processes that occur on a daily basis in a company and all the small decisions managers and employees take during the implementation of change and the creation of knowledge.


Finnegan and Willcocks note that CRM implementation is not the straightforward process that many of the trade publications would have us believe. They state the failure rate of large CRM projects may be as high at 70%. Through the lens of two detailed case studies, the authors investigate why CRM is no panacea.

About the Author

David Finnegan, MBA, PhD, has twelve years senior management experience and is a CRM and Systems Integration Specialist. He works internationally as an integration consultant and trainer, while developing postgraduate academic programmes for several universities in the UK and USA. He is also presently working as an Assistant Professor at Warwick Business School. He has worked in a range of roles, including with the Swedish Home Office, and has over 10 years experience in leadership training, system integration, business analyses and business process re-engineering in B2B and B2C environments.

Leslie P. Willcocks, BA, MA, PhD, has an international reputation for his work on outsourcing, information systems, IT strategies, evaluation and organizational change. He is Professor in Technology, Work and Globalization at London School of Economics and Visiting Professor at the Universities of Erasmus and Melbourne.  He has co-authored 28 books and published over 150 papers in journals ranging from Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review to MIS Quarterly and Journal of Management Studies. He is a regular keynote speaker and retained as adviser and educator by corporations worldwide.