Improving customer oriented decision making through the customer interaction approach

Abstract: An organisation that has a robust customer interaction approach can develop a more holistic understanding of its customers. This insight is crucial for reducing related uncertainty in management decision-making. Understanding of the customer is a basic tenet for supporting decision makers in taking the right decisions. The objective of this literature review is to learn about the evolution of the customer interaction approach. The customer interaction approach is stressed as a relationship channel between the customer and organisation. The emergence of the customer interaction approach is discussed in terms of four existing approaches to customer related quality improvement:Total Quality Management (TQM); Service Quality Frameworks (SERVQUAL), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Customer Experience Management (CEM). This analysis indicates a number of key observations about CRM and CEM as the most recent customer interaction approaches. In the existing literature, CRM and CEM are well-defined. Distinctly, the relationship between CRM and CEM is complementary in nature. This means CRM promotes the management of customer data in a systematic way within a firm, while CEM reaches beyond the boundary of the organisation to support a holistic customer interaction approach underpinned by CRM data.