Comparative study of customer relationship management research from East Asia, North America and Europe: A bibliometric overview

Customer relationship management (CRM) has become a critical research topic for scholars and practitioners, yet most existing CRM research overviews depend on the authors’ subjective judgements and are limited to the marketing field, making it difficult to comprehensively understand CRM research. This study combines a quantitative bibliometric methodology with qualitative systematic analysis and provides a comprehensive CRM roadmap with a broad disciplinary scope. Using datasets from the Web of Science (WoS), this study conducts a co-word analysis of 1971 publications on CRM from East Asia, North America and Europe. The results suggest that CRM studies differ across regions: eastern studies emphasize utilizing technologies to develop CRM, and western studies focus on the effects of CRM programmes on outcomes. Based on the bibliometric analysis and CRM studies, this study provides a list of systematic questions worthy of being explored as it can provide insight for researchers and practitioners.