Customer Relationship Management: Past, Present, and Future

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has evolved from a tactical marketing tool into a strategic cornerstone for creating sustainable competitive advantage. This paper offers a comprehensive review of CRM’s past, present, and future, highlighting its transformation from satisfaction-driven models to engagement-oriented strategies. Leveraging a corpus of 1,025 CRM-related articles published between 1995 and 2023, we employ Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to identify six key research streams—experience, organization, satisfaction, loyalty, profitability, and community—and trace shifts in scholarly attention across these domains. Findings reveal a growing emphasis on designing compelling customer experiences and fostering brand communities, reflecting the rising strategic importance of emotional and social connections. The paper concludes by outlining critical research gaps, including the implications of digital transformation, evolving customer access, and the strategic potential of brand communities. These insights provide a roadmap for future CRM scholarship and practice in an increasingly data-driven and customer-centric marketplace.