The CRM Handbook: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management

Chapter FiveCRM in e-Business

Many of today’s (and now, yesterday’s) e-businesses have made the often fatal mistake of delaying customer-focused initiatives until their companies turned a profit. With pressure to gain market share, these companies have adopted the “customer at any cost” credo: in their zeal to capture market share, they assumed all customers are created equal. This meant handing free goods and services to new customers who might not return, selling products at cost or below, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on mass marketing campaigns with no hope of recouping their investments.

Analysts didn’t help matters by proclaiming “early to market” e-commerce companies the winners in their online categories, unless of course ...