To survive in the global market, focusing on the customer is becoming a key factor for companies big and small. It is known that it takes up to five times more money to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to make a new purchase. (Adrian Payne, 2002) Managing customer relationship is important for all businesses, but is critical for Service Businesses who rely on repeat customers, ongoing contracts and referrals. Therefore, customer retention is particularly important to SME’s because of their limited resources. With limited resources of finance and people, how might a service sector SME go about implementing a CRM system?

My research indicates that:

- SME’s do not always have the IT infrastructure or knowledge to implement many CRM systems
- SME’s need / want simpler integrated business systems, not lots of different complex systems
- SME’s want realistic IT investment in line with achievable business returns.

Thus, SME’s need a low cost CRM solution that adapts to their business model and IT structure instead of having to adapt their business model and IT structure to the CRM software. In addition, it should be possibl英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】e to introduce the software in little steps to not interrupt the current business. Very likely the business processes will have to react to changes in the future; thus the software should be easily adaptable to these future changes once installed.

 Introducing IT support for CRM, in particular for SME’s, requires solutions that adapt to the business model of the company. Most likely, it is not feasible for a SME to change their whole IT infrastructure for their CRM business due to limited financial and human resources. Therefore, the CRM software has to easily integrate in the existing IT environment of the company. To reduce costs, the software should be easily configurable by the company itself and not require expensive consultancy to adapt the software to the needs of the company. In SME’s, business processes may change more often than those in big companies. Since business processes are not stable and need to be adapted when the business of the company changes. A CRM software should be adaptable to such changes. To reduce costs and risks of introducing customer relationship management at a SME, a CRM solution should be established not in one big step but in several steps in a company. This, of course, requires software that has to integrate into the current IT infrastructure and that can be extended in a modular fashion.
 To sum up, the most important point for a service sector SME is to find a useful way to manage all the 本文来自：英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】