Below are some of the web sites and books that I would recommend if you want to deepen your understanding of (electronic) Customer Relationship Management.

- Web sites

1. CRM search engine
www.searchcrm.com
Part of the techtarget.com family of industry-specific search engines, this is a one-stop shop for CRM needs. It is somewhat more than just a search engine, including a market place to buy CRM-related books and a directory of vendors among other things.

2. CRMGuru.com
www.CRMguru.com
“Real CRM Gurus. Real Answers.” That’s the tagline for the site and it’s not an unjustified claim. Apart from some useful white papers, definitions and news the real attraction of this site (which had over 35,000 subscribers world-wide at last count) has to be its moderated discussion group CRM.Talk which has a consistently high level of high value contributions and contributors.

3. Personalization.com
www.personalisation.com
"personalization.com focuses on the most critical challenges facing e-businesses today - how to deliver value to the customer and to the business using profiles of customers. By seeking to provide a gathering point for all parties to address this challenge, personalization.com performs a real service for the e-commerce community." So says John Hagel, co-author of “Net Worth” and “Net Gain”. This is definitely in the eCRM, rather than CRM, arena but is a useful source of resources including forums, vendor details, associations, analysts’ views, events, books and news.

4. CRM Project
http://crmproject.com/
Published by Montgomery Research and sponsored by Andersen Consulting CRM Project is a tome of information on CRM and personalization. Particularly useful is the library of white papers from thought leaders in this sphere. Definitely worth a visit.

5. CRM-forum.com
www.crm-forum.com/
“The CRM-Forum is the pre-eminent independent on-line resource center for CRM professionals working in the business-consumer marketplace. It provides CRM professionals and companies involved in CRM on both the demand and supply side of the industry with a place to keep up-to-date with CRM developments, and to, meet, discuss, and contact each other about CRM-related issues.“ That’s what is says on the site and that’s exactly what this site is. A great, deep resource.

6. CRMcommunity.com
www.crmcommunity.com
This site has a strong white papers section but its distinguishing factor when compared to the other resources here is its emphasis on ‘community’. More of the content on the site is actually generated by users e.g. articles and the some of the discussion boards are lively and informative as a result.

7. CRMassist.com
www.crmassist.com
You would be forgiven for thinking this was a Yahoo site because of its design and navigation. This site is particularly useful for a more technical and vendor skew on CRM: if you’re looking for vendor solution white papers, for example, this is definitely the place to come.

8. European Centre for Customer Strategies
www.eccs.uk.com
Clearly the European focus is the unique slant to this site. A slick site that has a good Advice Centre containing plenty of CRM knowledge resources, a European Directory of CRM solution providers, and a unique Product Finder that, whilst not bullet-proof in its results, could be a useful first stab in any product selection process.

9. DestinationCRM.com
www.destinationcrm.com
This is the accompanying site to the industry standard magazines ‘CRM’ and ‘eCRM’. As such it gets a lot of attention, users and traffic. Not surprisingly, good for news and careers as these are the mainstay of the print publications. Personally, I don’t find this site quite as compelling as some of the others above. Should be in your CRM bookmarks nonetheless.

- Product Guides

Try the following for starters:

1. "Best-of-Breed CRM Software: Customer Relationship Management Functionality Grids" at http://www.businessfinancemag.com/SpecialReports/2000/crm/matrix.html

2. "CRM meets eCRM: An Executive Briefing" on this site at http://www.e-consultancy.com/book/crm_meets_ecrm/

3. "CRM Solutions Guide: Independent Reviews of CRM Technology" at http://www.crmguru.com/content/papers/

- Books

Below are the books that I would recommend both for their content and style and because they are reasonably up to date. In particular, I would single out Paul Greenberg’s book to be very useful.

1. CRM at the Speed of Light: Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time
Paul Greenberg
Osborne McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0072127821

2. The Relationship-Based Enterprise: Powering Business Success Through Customer Relationship Management
Ray McKenzie
McGraw-Hill
ISBN: 0070860815

3. Secrets of Customer Relationship Management: Its All About How You Make Them Feel
James G. Barnes
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ISBN: 0071362533

4. Driving Customer Equity : How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy
Roland Rust
Free Press
ISBN: 0684864665

5. Loyalty.com: Customer Relationship Management in the New Era of Internet Marketing
Frederick Newell
McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing
ISBN: 0071357750

If you're looking for CRM systems, you can download some free white papers on CRM on demand from Oracle from this link:

http://www.bayt.com/job/publisher-content

That's an excellent point Kate, too many people buy into the buzzword "CRM" without precisely defining what they expect it to give them. The more a client defines what success looks like, the more likely they are to achieve it.