Customer Relationship Management: A Strategic Imperative in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Nigeria

Abstract

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) represents both an overarching business philosophy and a process or tool to facilitate a truly customer-driven enterprise.  Facilitating long-term, win-win relationship between buyer and seller firms is a central tenet of CRM.  Given the promise of CRM, it is unfortunate that a high failure and abandonment rate for CRM initiatives is reported in Pharmaceutical Industry in Nigeria.  Rating of T-test showed the implementation of CRM factors in the pharmaceutical industry in Nigeria with the average value of 3.  This indicates that CRM should be used in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Nigeria, as a company-wide business strategy that would be designed to optimise profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction by focusing on highly defined and precise customer groups.  This should be accomplished by organising the firms around the customer segments, encouraging and tracking customer interaction with the firms, fostering customer-satisfying behaviours, and linking all processes of the firm from its customers through its suppliers.

Keywords: Customer-centric; Knowledge Management; Touch Point; Knowledge Centre; Web-based Interaction; Data Warehouse; Data Mining.