Table 1.

Evolution of customer management practices.

Constructs Business & Technological Impetus	Firm Response	Examples	Related Papers
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Systematic relationship marketing efforts informed by a customer database that tracks customer interactions with the selling firm across all touch points over the relationship lifecycle in order to maximize the value of the customer portfolio.
• Commoditized database technology enables every firm to track customers' demographic, and transactional data.	• Firms are enabled to use customer demographic and transactional data at customer touchpoints. • Firms are enabled to build relationship marketing and loyalty programs on top of CRM databases.	• Salesforce introduces CRM software that can be used in a web browser. • SugarCRM introduces open source CRM software.	Stone et al. (1996); Chen and Popovich (2003); Verhoef (2003); Reinartz et al. (2004); Mithas et al. (2005); Payne and Frow (2005)
Customer Experience: Evaluation and design of the customer journey as the set of customer experiences and reactions to the selling firm's offering and touchpoints.
• Customer touchpoint data is made available to product and service design teams. • Improved software enables firms to measure customers' satisfaction, and view the customers' journey.	• Product and service designers use touchpoint data to improve products and services. • Product and service designers deploy satisfaction surveys to measure customers' satisfaction along the customer journey.	• BMW Corporate designs customer journey touchpoints by analyzing dealerships' sales and service satisfaction scores. • UnderArmour uses a panel of 10,000 athletes to test satisfaction with new clothing technology.	Mittal and Lassar (1996); Oliver (1997); Novak et al. (2000); Lam et al. (2004); Richards and Jones (2008); Fornell et al. (2010); Grönroos (2011); Ekici (2013); Kim et al. (2020)
Customer Engagement: Developing engaged customers who exhibit physical, cognitive and emotional customer contributions beyond customer transactions.
• Rise of social media enables firms to measure ancillary behaviors such as word of mouth, usage, and customers' feedback. • Improved software enables firms to measure customers' sentiment and directly collaborate with customers.	• Firms use ancillary behavior data to inform product design and service choices. • Firms transition away from one way messaging toward two-way conversations with advocates, neutral parties, and detractors.	• YouTube implements new algorithm to consider “watch time” as a key indicator for surfacing videos to viewers. • TikTok provides creators video creation tools that increase time spent in app.	Alsup (1993); Van Doorn et al. (2010); Henderson, Steinhoff, and Palmatier (2014); So et al. (2016); Harmeling et al. (2017); Purcărea (2018)
Customer Success Management: Proactively prioritizing customers' experience and engagement toward maximum value-in-use.
• Increasing trend toward ecommerce, zero cost distribution, and utilization based billing decrease customers' dependence and sunk cost biases. • Ubiquity of sensors and compute power enable firms to more closely measure customers' value-in-use, and predict and model customers' behavior.	• Product and service designers match customers' goal pursuits with appropriate goal means. • Firms build on a foundation of customer experience and engagement to prioritize customers' goal achievement.	• Google surfaces direct answers in search results in order to help users answer questions more quickly and easily. • ABB Robotics enables customers to remotely monitor and adjust industrial machines.	Porter and Heppelmann (2015); Zoltners et al. (2019); Hochstein et al. (2020)