CRM is a business strategy that includes a series of business and technology functions that contribute to the successful management of the lifecycle of a customer. e-CRM is Electronic Customer Relationship Management (e-CRM). This paper discusses e-CRM at length, identifies the benefits, and discusses the process, tools and implementation methods. It also highlights the role of data warehouses, data mining, linguistic technologies and finally concludes with a discussion on the future of e-CRM.

Since the introduction of the term `relationship marketing' by Berry (1983), interest has been growing in the value of `retained customers' and in the notion `customer relationships are assets that can be managed in order to improve customer retention and profitability.' Although antecedents of relationship marketing can be traced back to the ancient times (Gronroos 1994, 1996) much of this interest in relationship marketing evolved from research in industrial marketing and services marketing, undertaken in the 1980s (though in India it came at a much later stage). It is during the 1990s that the interest in relationship marketing grew significantly.

During the development phase of the field, several leading scholars suggested that relationship marketing represents a paradigm shift in marketing approach and orientation (Gronroos, 1996; Parvatiyar and Sheth, 1997). Others such as Berry (1995) have described it as a `new-old concept' and have argued that its emergence has been not so much a `discovery', but a `rediscovery' of an approach which has long proved to be the cornerstone of many successful businesses.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management, e-CRM, implementation, data warehouses, data mining, linguistic technologies, retention, profitability, antecedents, industrial marketing, services marketing, orientation, emergence, cornerstone, profitable customers, acquiring, retaining, partnering, communication technologies, economically feasible.