We discuss an issue critical to companies that invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM): how to assess return on investment (ROI). A number of issues make this task challenging. First, defining the boundaries of CRM; second, establishing what constitutes a CRM investment; third, deciding what counts as a ‘return’ on that investment; and, finally, choosing the time frame to use in the assessment. We first review the literature on the effectiveness of CRM, and then propose a customer-journey approach to computing ROI on CRM. This approach traces the customer’s value from initial acquisition, through development to retention. We then propose a series of research propositions that can help inform how business performance can be affected while implementing CRM.