Customer relationship marketing of Thai SMEs in product, service and distributing industry.

Abstract

Many Thai SMEs companies have implemented Customer Relationship Marketing, so that they can maintain customer satisfaction and create the opportunities to gain more effective and efficient marketing in order to gain competitive advantage. This research aims to identifying and investigating the Customer Relationship Marketing activities of Thai SMEs in three industries; service, product and distributing applied at different stages of the customer relationship development process. The Customer Relationship Marketing activities were collected from fourteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with Thai SMEs owners. The investigating found seven Customer Relationship Marketing activities were used as Getting contact with customers, Give special gift on the event, doing social activity together with customers, Study Master's degree to build relationship, Arrange meeting to announce new technology and products, Evaluation by customers and Using CRM software. Moreover, the benefits that SMEs got from this implemented consists Getting opportunity to do the job for customer, Saving the expenses from creating a new customer, Getting repeat order, Getting feedback from customer, Increasing positive Word of mouth, Getting mutual benefit and Getting sustainable relationship. In addition, the result of this research prove that Thai SMEs have the customer relationship development process as the conceptual framework of the relationship development process stages from part of client relationship marketing of Woo & Leelapanyalert (2014); pre-relationship, exploratory, expansion, and stable stages.