CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM): STATE OF THE ART, BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW OF HIGH-QUALITY BRAZILIAN PRODUCTION, INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF RESEARCH IN BRAZIL AND RESEARCH AGENDA

ABSTRACT

It is a consensus among the major authors in the field of customer relationship management (CRM), or relationship marketing, the importance of strategic management of relationships between organizations and their customers, especially within the context of increasingly aggressive competitiveness. Thus, this study aims to build an overview of studies on CRM, presenting the results of a bibliometric review that covers syntheses of the state of the art and of the the empirical studies 2013 period to highlight the production in the new millennium. Such analysis allowed the design of a research agenda as well as the institutionalization of research on CRM in Brazil. The information extracted from the papers to be analyzed were: the name of the ournal, year of publication, the study characterization, home institutions of the authors and the most studied issues in the CRM theme. For the empirical studies, we added the nature of the study, the sector in which the researched industry is inserted in, its core business, data collection instruments used by researchers and the methods of data analysis performed. Fifty-two papers were found. Among journals, REAd, RAC and Faces are those with more papers on CRM and the University of Sao Paulo was the institution that led the publications in the analyzed period. CRM in the B2C (business-to-consumer) context and its related variables (e.g., satisfaction and loyalty) were the most discussed issues in the papers whose majority consisted of theoretical-empirical studies, quantitative in nature, and focusing on the private sector economy, especially in the banking and retail branches. The results indeed pointed to the strategic importance to organizations of studies on CRM, which was demonstrated by an increase in the interest of researchers on the subject, considering the creation of research groups of CRM in Brazil and its scientific, technical and advisory indicators of production from the database of the Lattes Platform.

KEYWORDS
Customer relationship management (CRM); Bibliometric review; Brazilian production in the 2001-2013 period; Institutionalization of research on CRM in Brazil; Research agenda