23. - 25. 5. 2012, Brno, Czech Republic, EU STATUS OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT IN SLOVAKIA Martina JAKÁBOVÁ Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Faculty of Materials Science and Technology in Trnava, Paulínska 16, ř17 01 Trnava, martina.jakabova@gmail.com Abstract In today’s highly competitive environment, an increasing number of companies have reali zed the importance of becoming more customer-centric. They invested a large amount of time and resources in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM). However, it is increasingly more difficult for companies to know how to retain an existing customer and even harder getting new one. It is six to seven times more expensive and time consuming to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one. Not only the price is no longer critical, customers are changing their expectations and behaviour. They can easily compare the prices and change the plan from whom to buy at a minimal cost. This puts increasing demands on companies in the area of customer care and customer service. One of the ways to retain customer base and to ensure recurring purchases is adjusting to meet customer’s needs, ensuring its satisfaction – customer must be at the heart of company interests. Appropriately selected IT solution of CRM can help them. Despite this fact, the majority of companies still don’t use correctly all the possibilities whi ch CRM offering or many implemented CRM projects failed to be successful. The problem is that these companies often do not know why they were not successful. Other companies will make the same mistakes if these failures are not recognized. This paper is focused a brief overview of the current status of CRM in Slovak companies - the base research results. Keywords: Custom Relationship Management, Custom, Company, Research. 1. INTRODUCTION History of CRM goes back to the 60-ties when the ability to win and keep customers became one of the key factors of successful business. CRM as a philosophy gained ground in the 80-ties. Since then, it has experienced great development. Situation in the field of CRM copied the development all over the world as well as in Slovakia and other countries of Middle and Eastern Europe. In this period of time, most of the large companies were in the phase of general restructuring which was often connected with consolidation and centralization or organizational units and supporting systems. Enterprises gradually realized the importance of building and sustaining the long-term beneficial relationships with their customers. Significant development of CRM has mainly occurred in the last few years. In a large extent, it is related to the arrival of foreign enterprises that introduced CRM standards. Nowadays, every enterprise that wants to survive on the market, and grow eventually, has to solve the problem of satisfying the individual needs of customers and sustaining the long-term beneficial relationships with them. [1] Adopting CRM brings the knowledge that long-term relationships with customers are among the most important assets of each enterprise providing better profitability, competitive advantages, stabilization of endangered relationships with customers, reaching the customers’ satisfaction with the complaints, elimination of negative advertising and sustaining of positive image, reduction of distrust and potential conflicts etc. [2, 3] This paper contributes to better understanding of the CRM problem, mainly in the enterprises in Slovakia. 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM Customer relationship management problem is very wide and it is considered one of the elementary means of the enterprise’s competitiveness. It reacts to the fact that the main source of all gains and profits are the