Small to Medium Enterprises in the Danish conference sector and a 360-degree approach to managing customer relationships

Purpose – Many corporate enterprises use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) techniques to manage customer information in order to attain competitive advantage. The purpose of this study was to understand how small to medium enterprises (SME‟s) in the Danish conference sector manage and build customer relationships and to investigate the extent to which they were prepared to adopt a 360-degree view when pursuing a customer relationship management approach.

Design/methodology/approach - A qualitative, explorative triangulated case study method was conducted to explore this in more depth.

Findings - The findings revealed that SME‟s in the sector essentially manage customer relations using a database system without having a completely integrated CRM system. The main barriers/challenges were technology and internal education.

Originality/value - The paper indicates that although SME‟s in the sector focus
increasingly on building and managing individual customer relationships, they appear not to be fully prepared to achieve a 360-degree view.