Many companies have initiated projects to improve on customer orientation and plan the implementation of customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Among the desired benefits are increased customer satisfaction and retention by providing personalized products and value added services. Although the potentials of CRM are obvious only a few successful CRM implementations are known in practice. This article describes the results of a cross-industry benchmarking project in which 120 companies participated. The results show that there is no ?unique? CRM project and that successful implementations are rarely technical projects. From the research six critical success factors for CRM projects emerged: stepwise evolution, straightforward implementation and long-term project, organizational redesign, integrated system architecture of standard components, change management, and top management support. The six successful practice companies show examples of how these critical success factors are applied.