Customer relationship management as a tool for sustainable competitive advantage and exemplar companies with worldwide success

In the recent years, due to the existence of innumerable companies, it has become quite difficult to gain advantage in competitiveness. Considering the fact that differentiated activities, strategies and policies of companies or the company resources can easily be imitated by the rivals and the advantage can be lost; the gained advantage in competitiveness should not be for short term and has to carry the necessary qualities for sustainability (Güleş and Bülbül, 2005). In this way, the companies can have a long term relationship with their customers which will bring customer loyalty and long term profit. In addition to the customer loyalty, there are some other conditions that the companies should meet to be preferred. These can be listed as reducing the costs in the production phase; flexibility in meeting the changing needs and demands of the customers fastly and punctually and putting the quality first. The approach of focusing on the customers to secure advantage in competitiveness, brought the approach of Customer Relationship Management. At this point, collecting information about the customers and using them in order to produce unique products and services has become one of the main conditions of an effective and sustainable supremacy in the competition. In this paper, exemplar companies which gained speed, quality and flexibility in their products and services due to their successful implementation of CRM will be analyzed in detail in order to explain the effect of successful CRM implementations in the protection of long-term advantage in competitiveness.