Abstract. Customer relationship management (CRM) has once again gained
prominence amongst academics and practitioners. However, there is a tremendous
amount of confusion regarding its domain and meaning. In this paper, the authors
explore the conceptual foundations of CRM by examining the literature on
relationship marketing and other disciplines that contribute to the knowledge of
CRM. A CRM process framework is proposed that builds on other relationship
development process models. CRM implementation challenges as well as CRM's
potential to become a distinct discipline of marketing are also discussed in this
paper.