Customer Reviews

The Relationship-Based Enterprise: Powering Business Success Through Customer Relationship Management

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This book not only does an outstanding job of defining CRM (finally) and uncovering the basic concepts involved in CRM but also provides simple, well-organized frameworks for even the uninitiated to pursue. It takes senior management away from the current "IT silver bullet" thinking about CRM and positions it at the business strategy level.

At times, the book seems like a voice crying in the CRM wilderness. However, given the simple and powerful concepts, clearly derived from significant real life exposure, the book will probably provide tomorrow's CRM management gospel.

This book is required reading for marketing and IT executives, and for everyone who wants to be prepared for the new economy - especially for organizations trying to combine "bricks and clicks".

-- Jean-Marc Nantais, Director, Corporate Marketing, Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE)

This is one of the worst books I have read on any topic recently. It is a bad "me-too" product on CRM. The writer obviously thinks that he invented some "great new" concepts, the main one being the "Relationship-Based Enterprise". But I think this is a terribly hollow concept which is presented in such a "romantic" way in the book. Pages 14 through 95 are about this romantic presentation of the concept. But the point is exactly the same as in pp.1-9. After reading all that nonsense, you end up thinking "why did I have to go through this torture" because the same stuff was already said in pp1-9.

His other great invention is defining CRM as "conversations". Eureka!!!! I suggest he should re-read Peppers&Rogers "1to1 Fieldbook" where he can find both concepts and they are much clearly elaborated there. Oh, I was forgetting, there is another great invention too: The three D's. So, if marketing has four P's why shouldn't CRM have 3D's. There you go, our writer has invented that also. They are Discovery, Dialogue and Discipline. The first two are actually Peppers&Rogers' Identify and Interact. The last one, would you believe, is about management. You may say shouldn't it be an 'M'? Yes, but then you wouldn't have the sexappeal of the 3D's.

This is a me-too book, which, for the sake of being novel, takes up existing ideas and concepts, presents them in such a confusing way so that the reader may think they are so complicated and then goes to use graphs and diagrams to elaborate these normally straightforward but made-confusing points. Just pathetic! I am really furious because of spending my energy and forcing my patience for reading a book I do not still know what is about. Was it Marketing 101, Consumer 101, or CRM '0' ?

Customer Relationship Management is a topic that permeates DMR Consulting, a vision at the core of the company's outlook toward long-term relationships with customers. During the period of time I have been employed with DMR, I have experienced a phenomenon not common with other companies, a concept that is a case in point for the topics of this book, what I call "Employee Relationship Management" (ERM). Whether this term is real or not, CRM is clearly not an acquired trait of DMR, but rather an inherent trait attained through years of hard work. I believe the topics of this book were written from long experience, because I have felt the key points of this subject firsthand as an employee of DMR. DMR obviously considers ERM at least as important as CRM, since profit is not the primary consideration at the bottom line, at fiscal end. This book is about people, first and foremost, seconded only by value. Providing the complete solution, and not just a singular service, is a key aspect of CRM, and of DMR Consulting.