Abstract
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Three main CRM research categories covered: e-CRM, implementing CRMS and adopting CRMS.
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Precise CRM research review and summarisation of empirical evidence for healthcare environments.
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Presents positive and negative outcomes of CRM technology in the healthcare sector.
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Results show significant gaps in the knowledge of CRM in the healthcare sector.
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Few studies apply mixed methodologies and theories to investigate the CRM technology in the healthcare sector.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is an innovative technology that seeks to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability by acquiring, developing, and maintaining effective customer relationships and interactions with stakeholders. Numerous researches on CRM have made significant progress in several areas such as telecommunications, banking, and manufacturing, but research specific to the healthcare environment is very limited. This systematic review aims to categorise, summarise, synthesise, and appraise the research on CRM in the healthcare environment, considering the absence of coherent and comprehensive scholarship of disparate data on CRM. Various databases were used to conduct a comprehensive search of studies that examine CRM in the healthcare environment (including hospitals, clinics, medical centres, and nursing homes). Analysis and evaluation of 19 carefully selected studies revealed three main research categories: (i) social CRM ‘eCRM’; (ii) implementing CRMS; and (iii) adopting CRMS; with positive outcomes for CRM both in terms of patients relationship/communication with hospital, satisfaction, medical treatment/outcomes and empowerment and hospitals medical operation, productivity, cost, performance, efficiency and service quality. This is the first systematic review to comprehensively synthesise and summarise empirical evidence from disparate CRM research data (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed) in the healthcare environment. Our results revealed that substantial gaps exist in the knowledge of using CRM in the healthcare environment. Future research should focus on exploring: (i) other potential factors, such as patient characteristics, culture (of both the patient and hospital), knowledge management, trust, security, and privacy for implementing and adopting CRMS and (ii) other CRM categories, such as mobile CRM (mCRM) and data mining CRM.