Article review

The article Customer management and CRM: addressing the dark side of a group author Pennie Frow, Adrian Payne, Ian F. Wilkinson and Louise Young discusses about the customer relationship management and its dark side. Today, customer relationship management is defined as being the strategic management of relationships with customers, involving appropriate use of technology (Frow et. Al 2011). Besides, customer relationship management is also considered as a system which provides means for retaining individual loyalty, and eventually creating sustainable competitive advantages. For CRM to work efficiently a business must fully understand the changing nature of the customers. In this article, the authors not only outline about the dark side of customer relationships but also provide the key types of dark side behaviors and the way to overcome it. And the part has the most impression on me is the dark side of service provider relationships because it gives me a real look about the customer relationship manager in particular and hospitality industry in general. Its so important and useful for my current major- business administration. First of all, it cannot be denied the benefits of customer relationship management and relationship marketing; they are the key for the enterprises. The authors have used a numerous of reliable researches and writers such as: report of success stories (Aberdeen Group, 2003), case studies of companies practicing CRM or RM (Rigby and Ledingham, 2004) to prove. However, they exists some dark sides insides and actually, its going to increase. According to some research, it was said that many companies made

bad operations that influence the customers such as binding them with contracts, bleeding them with fees, and confounding them with fine print, including the most concern industries: cell phone service providers, banks, clubs, rental companies. It is because the service providers will use so many complicated rules with a lot of condition of sales in order to make the customer feel confused resulted in making wrong decisions. In short, the higher number of customers mistakes, the more strategies that the service providers provide. Second of all, they point out two key reasons for poor customer management that may lead to dark side service provider behavior (according to Frow et al). The first one is that the lacking of understanding about CRM strategies and the second one is from the service provider who can abuse the customers by CRM technology. One type of abusing CRM is using wrong information, dishonesty, and revealed private information and another type of dark side behaviors which are deliberately provided to customers that includes:

- customer favoritism: CRM involves segmenting customers based on

characteristics of their buying behavior and their economic attractiveness.

- customer lock-in: With the purpose to retain customers, the service

providers make it more complicated and costly so that the customers will change the new one.

- relationship neglect: service providers loose the abilities and become too
old to design and add more value.

- financial exploitation: means try to exploit from customers financing and

use it like another revenue.

It is the most impressive part to me because the authors have discussed about the dark side of service provider relationship quite specifically with the clear examples and convincing evidences. In short, this article identified the dark side behaviors to be avoided. According to them, in order to set up a new CRM strategy framework, its necessary to make a development process to meet the needs of customers with the resources and the abilities of the service providers. In the next part, they discuss about how the negative outcomes of customer management can be addressed through a more holistic approach to CRM involving a focus on five keys strategic process. They are:

strategy development process value creation process multi- channel and customer experience process information management process performance assessment process

And the last part is to identify the key areas for future research.

- Firstly, they distinguished between the intended and the unintended

consequences of customer management and CRM. Secondly, systemic dark side behaviors may remain to be identified in the future. Future research should identify the scope, scale and economic and social impact of dark side practices

- there is a need to identify whether dark side practices are more prevalent
in some industry contexts than in others and whether the impact of dark side practices varies from industry to industry.

- Certain dark side activity may be driven by other underlying dark side
behaviour. Deeper examination of dark side practices will allow comparison with the results of best practices in CRM and customer management, identification of deviation from them and potential remedy for dark side practices.

- greater attention needs to be directed at making dark side practices more

visible and vivid. In conclusion, the article is an interesting and useful resource. It helps the service providers in some ways understand how to avoid damaging dark side behavior during the interactions with customers and the ethical

consequences of dark sides behavior, also presented the way to address some negative outcomes of customer relationship management.

References: Australian school of business, (2011), Customer relationship management: A dangerous walk on the dark side, viewed 9th January, 2012 Danna Voth (2007), The tales from the Dark side, viewed 10th January, 2012

Em World (2011), CRM (Customer relationship management) view 9th, January, 2012 Payne A and Frow P 2004 Developing a Strategic Approach to Customer Relationship Management viewed 10th January, 2012 Nguyen Bang (2010), The dark side of CRM view 10th, January, 2012 Randall Burgess (2011), CRM for the dark side, viewed 10th January, 2012