Factors influencing customer relationship management at an automotive component manufacturer in East London

In the late 1990s, customer relationship management (CRM) was formed as a popular business term, which holds the same roots as relationship marketing and enhances the paradigm with the emerging information technologies (Öztayşi, Sezgin, Özok, 2011:944). For a supply chain to be effective, an organisation must decide on the nature of the relationship appropriate to product and market conditions and adapt management practises to that relationship (Bensaou, 1999:35). Current competitive challenges induced by globalisation, and advances in information technology have forced companies to focus on managing customer relationships. This study offers a modest contribution to evaluating factors influencing customer relationship management at an automotive component manufacturer in East London. The challenge for businesses is changing the current paradigm to a customer-centric approach. A theoretical overview was conducted to evaluate various definitions, CRM models, factors influencing CRM and the impact of competitive advantage on critical success factors. The research highlighted a number of common themes of CRM, which includes keeping the customer happy, customer satisfaction, reciprocal relationship between the organisation and employees, enthusiasm, involvement and motivation. This research identified which factors make positive contributions to key competitive advantage outcomes such as price, quality, delivery and flexibility capability. The study included an evaluation of findings. From the survey responses, the results were used to draw conclusions and develop various recommendations. The conclusions centered on the customer relationship management success factors defined in the survey. The results were then compared to previous studies. Survey findings of the current study and those of past studies were discussed. The recommendations focused on the top items identified in each factor group. Many factors influence CRM success in the organisation. The findings led to the conclusion that top management needs to support, and place focus on key activities that form part of the value proposition, capabilities and mix of resources on the CRM process, as well as the people and the procedures that make effective value creation

Factors influencing customer relationship management at an automotive component manufacturer in East London

In the late 1990s, customer relationship management (CRM) was formed as a popular business term, which holds the same roots as relationship marketing and enhances the paradigm with the emerging information technologies (Öztayşi, Sezgin, Özok, 2011:944). For a supply chain to be effective, an organisation must decide on the nature of the relationship appropriate to product and market conditions and adapt management practises to that relationship (Bensaou, 1999:35). Current competitive challenges induced by globalisation, and advances in information technology have forced companies to focus on managing customer relationships. This study offers a modest contribution to evaluating factors influencing customer relationship management at an automotive component manufacturer in East London. The challenge for businesses is changing the current paradigm to a customer-centric approach. A theoretical overview was conducted to evaluate various definitions, CRM models, factors influencing CRM and the impact of competitive advantage on critical success factors. The research highlighted a number of common themes of CRM, which includes keeping the customer happy, customer satisfaction, reciprocal relationship between the organisation and employees, enthusiasm, involvement and motivation. This research identified which factors make positive contributions to key competitive advantage outcomes such as price, quality, delivery and flexibility capability. The study included an evaluation of findings. From the survey responses, the results were used to draw conclusions and develop various recommendations. The conclusions centered on the customer relationship management success factors defined in the survey. The results were then compared to previous studies. Survey findings of the current study and those of past studies were discussed. The recommendations focused on the top items identified in each factor group. Many factors influence CRM success in the organisation. The findings led to the conclusion that top management needs to support, and place focus on key activities that form part of the value proposition, capabilities and mix of resources on the CRM process, as well as the people and the procedures that make effective value creation

Customer relationship management (CRM) of hotels in the context of variety-seeking behaviour (VSB)

This study combined two significant areas in marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and variety-seeking behaviour (VSB), which are paradoxical constructs due to their contradictory intentions. While organisations implement various customer relationship management practices with an intention of retaining customers and generating loyalty, a preference for variety-seeking behaviour can make customers switch. This study investigated the impact of variety-seeking behaviour on generating outcomes of customer relationship management practices in the hotel context, by focusing exclusively on leisure travellers. Even though customer relationship management is widely adopted in the hotel domain, much of its discussions are on implementation related aspects, rather than on the practices that manifest due to CRM implementations. Thus, only a few studies have investigated the effectiveness of CRM from a customer point of view. Numerous factors affecting customer switching behaviour have also been discussed in the hotel literature. Variety-seeking behaviour is identified as a key factor influencing customer loyalty and switching in numerous other services in the tourism domain. However, variety-seeking behaviour in the hotel domain has not received scholarly attention. This study investigated the customer relationship management practices experienced by leisure travellers in their hotel visits. Based on the observations from the literature, and also from studies on variety-seeking behaviour in other contexts, this study explored whether leisure travellers seek variety in the hotel context. Combining the two domains, it then investigated the impact of variety-seeking behaviour on the effectiveness of customer relationship management to generate its outcomes. In turn, it also determined the impact of customer relationship management on influencing the variety-seeking behaviour of leisure travellers. This study adopted a sequential mixed method design. The initial qualitative stage explored the concepts in-depth, and addressed four exploratory research questions. It also generated items to initiate the subsequent quantitative phase, and to generate hypotheses. The quantitative phase involved pilot testing, validating a new measurement scale, testing the hypotheses and making generalisations to a larger population. The qualitative phase involved five focus groups which consisted of 22 participants in total. The quantitative stage involved a survey which consisted of 400 responses. Prior to the survey a pilot test was conducted with a sample of 100 respondents. The samples for both qualitative and quantitative stages were selected based on the criterion ‘leisure travellers who have been to the same international destination two or more times’ This criterion was important in identifying hotel selection patterns which in turn provides grounds to understand variety-seeking behaviour of leisure travellers. The qualitative findings identified numerous customer relationship management practices experienced by leisure travellers. They were categorised as: pre-encounter, encounter and post-encounter practices. It was also found that while some seek familiarity many leisure travellers do seek variety in the hotel context. The data revealed that leisure travellers can be categorised into three groups based on their degree of variety-seeking behaviour, those who visit: 1) the same location and the same hotel 2) the same location and different hotels, and 3) different locations and different hotels. They were named the familiarity/familiarity seeking group (FF), the familiarity/variety seeking group (FV), and the variety/variety seeking group (VV) respectively. The quantitative stage commenced with validating a new measurement scale. The findings indicated that even though customer relationship management leads to word-of-mouth recommendation, it does not lead to repeat visitation. Through multi-group moderation analysis it was further identified that the outcomes of customer relationship management do not vary based on the degree of variety-seeking behaviour of travellers. The relationship between CRM and VSB was found to be two fold—while on the one hand customer relationship management leading to repeat visitation is fully mediated by the intrinsic factors affecting variety-seeking behaviour, on the other hand customer-relationship management does have a significant influence on variety-seeking behaviour. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on customer relationship management and variety-seeking behaviour. The theoretical contribution includes the identification of the impact of customer relationship practices on generating repeat visitation and word-of-mouth and the extension of the theory of VSB to the hotel context. This study pointed to some effective segmentation dimensions and methods to improve targeted communication that can be used by hotel practitioners. The mixed method approach enhanced the methodological rigor used in realising the above contributions

Intention to use mobile customer relationship management systems

© Emerald Group Publishing Limited. Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the behavioral intentions of business-to-business (B2B) sales managers to use mobile customer relationship management (CRM) systems in the course of their day-to-day activities. Design/methodology/approach - An extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) of mobile CRM system adoption is developed and tested with data from 105 international sales managers representing five B2B companies. Findings - The study extends the TAM framework with three additional constructs derived from mobile technology and sales force automation literature, namely personal innovativeness in the domain of IT, perceived risk, and perceived reachability. The model demonstrates that personal innovativeness and perceived reachability have significant effects on the TAM framework. Research limitations/implications - The relatively small sample size limits the generalization of the results. Practical implications - Sales managers' intention to adopt mobile CRM can be explained by the extended TAM framework. Understanding the key factors that influence intention to adopt a mobile CRM system will aid companies in implementing it among their sales force. Companies willing to foster adoption of a mobile CRM system among the sales force could focus on communicating the usefulness of using the system and benefits gained from enhanced reachability. Recruiting sales people with strong personal innovativeness is beneficial. Originality/value - This study responds the calls for studies on mobile platforms and on the use of mobile B2B applications in sales force management. It is among the first attempts to incorporate variables derived from mobile technology acceptance literature among the sales force into the TAM framework, to better explain acceptance of mobile CRM systems

The Use of Hosted Enterprise Applications by SMEs: A User Perspective

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in hosted enterprise applications (high complexity e-business applications) in the UK by investigating the relevance of organisational and technical factors through conducting interviews with SME users of hosted applications. The emergence and development of the application service provider (ASP) sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. Of particular interest in this paper is the emergence of service offerings targeted specifically at SMEs. The paper starts by considering information technology (IT) adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK. The empirical data collected from SME users of hosted enterprise applications is then analysed in order to produce the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems (hosted and resident) and service providers, iv) the attractiveness of the rental cost model and v) the intention to continue or extend their use of hosted applications within the enterprise. The early promise of the ASP sector appears not to have been generally realised for SMEs in the UK. This study explores the experience of early adopters of this new IT related innovation and identifies some significant business gains experienced by SME users. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take a deliberately SME user perspective and this paper make an important contribution in this emerging field

The Use of Hosted Enterprise Applications by SMEs: A Dual Market and User Perspective

YesThis deliberately dual perspective paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of SMEs in hosted enterprise applications in the UK. The emergence and development of the ASP sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. The paper starts by considering ICT adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK (market perspective). The study is extended by qualitative empirical data collected by semi-structured interviews with SME users of hosted enterprise applications (user perspective) and subsequent analysis in order to develop the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems and multiple service providers, iv) the financial attractiveness of the rental model and v) the intention to continue or extend the use of hosted applications. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take deliberately market and SME user perspectives - this paper makes an important contribution in this emerging field

The application framework of Kansei Engineering to enhance Customer Relationship Management in services

In order to fit what a customer needs and wants, a product or a service should be qualified. By incorporating Ergonomics/Human Factors and affect, quality of products and services should promote happiness and health to the users. Improved quality and long-lasting products/services make customers happy (Nagamachi & Lokman, 2011). According to Tribus (1990), quality is defined as a condition when customers have a love affair and emotional bondage with particular products and services. It implies that the main concern of qualified products and services is customer emotional experience. This study aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), understanding the customer emotional needs is one succesful key for CRM implementation. Kansei Engineering (KE) methodology that has been widely used for modeling the emotional needs in product design is proposed to support the CRM improvement. Hence, this study has two objectives. The first is to develop an integrative application framework of the contribution of KE to CRM, while the second is to provide an illustrative example of how to apply KE-CRM into service industry. This study is expected to contribute to the theoretical academic literatures on Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing management, Ergonomics/Human Factors and Kansei by proposing an application framework and methodology of integrated KE-CRM. In addition, practical contributions will be presented by providing a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, using the rich-channel of information for collecting information, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes

The integrative framework of Kansei Engineering and SERVQUAL incorporating CRM applied to services: A case study on hotel services in Surabaya

Understanding customer needs better is a key for the success of customer relationship management (CRM). It may cov-er insight into customer decision-making and information about customers. Essentially, CRM is to understand customer needs so that it may improve a company’s long-term profitability. Lack of customer focus is quite critical to the success of CRM implementation. Specifically, a mechanism for maintaining and developing customer loyalty is a key potential to be taken into account. In short, understanding of customer needs (both functional and emotional) is needed. More importantly, understanding customer emotional needs is vital for predicting and influencing customer purchasing be-havior. Customers today concern themselves more on satisfying their emotions and feelings more on satisfying their emotions than merely their cognition. Some commonly used service quality tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) and SERVQUAL have been applied extensively to services. Many service researchers have successfully used SERVQUAL and other similar scales to measure and improve service quality in a variety of industries. But none have been able to incorporate customers’ emotional needs. Some attention has been given to investigate this. But thus far, there is no formal methodology that can account for customer’s feelings and emotions taking into account CRM in ser-vice design. To fill this niche, this study proposes an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE) and SERVQUAL applied to services. This study uses data from tourists who stayed in hotels in Surabaya to demonstrate the integrative model framework and show how the customer emotional needs can be designed into its hotel services sys-tem