Promoting Excellence in Customer Management: Emerging Trends in Business

The importance of customer management as an area for research inspired the formation of an academic, UK based customer management research centre in 2006. The Centre is a unique collaboration between business and academia, which aims to promote excellence in customer management. Together its members discuss and share current challenges to create a genuine opportunity that harnesses the forward thinking that delivers growth; building transferable knowledge and turning it into effective practice. The purpose of this paper is to share the findings of a ten year longitudinal study of customer management issues that have been identified by businesses that have collaborated with the research centre; and to identify emerging trends in marketing that are being reported and which will provide opportunities for future research through practical best practice case study examples. Over the last decade many themes have emerged and have been researched within the Centre; areas such as gaining insight into on-line and off-line customer experiences, managing out-sourced relationships, multi-channel marketing and dealing with service recovery through effective complaint handling. Using social media for innovation, collaboration and commercialization has also been a key theme that has frequently been raised. One area that members have identified as an emerging focus for research is managing the customer journey more effectively so that organizations can make it easier to become a customer whilst simultaneously adding value to the customer experience. A further research opportunity is exploring how organizations can effectively develop the softer side of their business to improve customer management, for example, how to achieve an engaged culture and climate so that it improves business performance. By identifying these emerging business trends it is then possible to design a research agenda that will help companies to continuously innovate and adapt; leading to an improved customer-centric focus and sustaining a competitive edge.