2nd Generation of CRM

Customers and customer relationships lie at the very core of the business of banking. It is therefore not surprising that CRM (customer relationship management) solutions promising banks the ability to manage customer relationships were instantly popular when they were launched over a decade back. The mid-1990s saw several banks going in for large scale deployments of CRM technology. Unfortunately, a majority of these initiatives turned out to be costly, complex enterprise-wide projects with lengthy implementation time and banks did not get adequate returns from their massive investments. So much so, that by the early part of this century, CRM had gained a bad name in the banking industry with most banks washing their hands off anything to do with CRM technology.

Looking back, experts suggest that where banks floundered was firstly