Revisiting the Use of Customer Information for CRM

For the past decade, customer relationship management (CRM) has been one of the priorities in marketing research and practice. However, many of the CRM systems did not perform as the companies expected. As such shortcoming could be due to inappropriate data input, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the empirical CRM literature. Along the phases of the CRM process, the authors show which kind of data has successfully proven to achieve the CRM objectives. The study provides researchers with a review of the empirical research on CRM and allows practitioners insights on the usability of customer data for CRM. --Customer Relationship Management (CRM),Customer Data

Multichannel in a complex world

The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every organisation in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience professionals from every sector. This report seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround multichannel and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are key to multichannel success. As part of the research for this report, we spoke to six experienced customer experience and marketing practitioners from large organisations across different sectors. In Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, Akin Arikan (2008) said: ‘Because customers are multichannel beings and demand relevant, consistent experiences across all channels, businesses need to adopt a multichannel mind-set when listening to their customers.’ It was clear from the companies interviewed for this report that it remains challenging for many organisations to maintain consistency across so many customer touchpoints. Not only that, but the ability to balance consistency with the capability to fully exploit the unique attributes of each channel remains an aspiration for many. The proliferation of devices and digital channels has added complexity to customer journeys, making issues around the joining up of customer experience and the attribution of value of key importance to many. Whilst senior leaders within the organisations spoken to seem to be bought in to multichannel, this buy-in was not always replicated across the rest of the organisation and did not always translate into a cohesive multichannel strategy. A number of companies were undertaking work around customer journey mapping and customer segmentation, using a variety of passive and actively collected data in order to identify specific areas of poor customer experience and create action plans for improvement. Others were undertaking projects using sophisticated tracking and tagging technologies to develop an understanding of the value and role of specific channels and to provide better intelligence to the business on attribution that might be used to inform future investment decisions. A consistent barrier to improving customer experience is the ability to join up many different legacy systems and data in order to provide a single customer view and form the basis for delivery of a more consistent and cohesive multichannel approach. Whilst there remain significant challenges around multichannel, there are some useful technologies allowing businesses to develop better insight into customer motivation and activity. Nonetheless, delivery of seamless multichannel experience remains a work-inprogress for many

The effect of organizational culture on CRM success

Copyright @ 2013 EMCIS.The aim of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework exemplifying the effect of organizational culture on the success of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems' implementation. This is deemed significant as yet little research has investigated the role of organizational culture as a critical success factor to CRM implementation. The proposed theoretical framework is developed based on the notion that nurturing an organizational culture that promotes adaptive learning leads to better management of customer information that in turn improves the quality of customer information, which is considered a key contributor to successful implementation of CRM initiatives. The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is used to measure "Organizational Culture" since it has proven its validity in examining the effect of organizational culture on organizational effectiveness and performance

Why should SME adopt IT enabled CRM strategy?

Recent trends of fast adoption of CRM, whether as a philosophy, a strategy, an aid to the general marketing effort and mix, or merely as a fashion; as every body else is doing it; is driven by a clear acknowledgement and recognition that long-term relationships with customers are one of the most important assets of an organization and that information-enabled systems must be developed that will give the organization some form of ownership, that is: 'customer ownership'.CRM, SME, IT, e-tools, strategy

Innovating the delivery of individual services within Flemish cities: inventory of ICT-driven heterogeneity

Flemish cities are setting up large scale reform trajectories to make their transactional service delivery more customer orientated, customer friendly and integrated. The implementation of new ICTs plays a key role in these innovation processes; there seems to be a great, technological deterministic, belief in the possibilities offered by for example mid office technologies. In this paper, we explore and compare such innovation trajectories within two Flemish cities. We describe the context, the object, the process and the evaluation of change. Based on this inductive analysis, we reflect upon the dependent and independent variables that structure the processes of change. We make use of a ‘neo-institutional theoretical lens’ to identify relevant internal and external institutional factors that shape the implementation context for the organizational changes. The analysis generates interesting findings. Whereas the external environment to a large degree functions as a stable variable, the heterogeneity between both cities is much more determined by the organizational ‘path’, i.e. the management model, capacities, subcultures, existing ICT-infrastructure, etc. Further research is needed as important questions remain unanswered. For example: does the mixed set of organizational, technological and cultural changes also actually produces the outcomes that were formulated in terms of both increased effectiveness and efficiency

Multichannel business strategies and performance

[ES]El uso de Internet y las nuevas tecnologías de información está en continuo crecimiento. En el pasado año el comercio electrónico en España supuso 12.383 millones de euros, con 27.2 millones de usuarios (ONTSI, 2012). Estos nuevos instrumentos suponen una revolución en la gestión tradicional de las relaciones con los clientes. Resulta fundamental entender que las empresas tienen que atender las demandas del consumidor de manera efectiva e inmediata. Este nuevo consumidor 360º supone considerar al cliente desde una perspectiva integrada, puesto que dispone de información multicanal completa y actualizada. Las empresas necesitan por lo tanto sacar partido de sus fuentes de información internas y externas para evaluar los requerimientos de compra del consumidor y atenderlos de manera que el proceso de compra sea una experiencia plenamente satisfactoria. Las empresas (especialmente las PYMES) nunca se habían encontrado con este desafío (los consumidores tienen más acceso que nunca a información instantánea de manera gratuita), por lo que resulta fundamental atender las necesidades del cliente multicanal

Adoption of CRM technology in multichannel environment : a review (2000-2013)

Despite the relevance of customer relationship management (CRM), there is a lack of a comprehensive literature review and a classification scheme for it in the last five years. This work provides an academic database of literature between the periods of 2000–2013, covering 28 journals and proposes a classification scheme to classify the articles in accordance to CRM main paths. Around fifty five hundred articles were identified and reviewed for their direct relevance to CRM in a multichannel environment. Eighty-seven articles were subsequently selected, reviewed and classified. Each of the selected papers was categorized on four CRM dimensions (Identification, Attraction, Retention and Development) and in the different channels involved (personnel sales, call center, email, web, and mobile). The review process was independently verified and promote interesting findings: Findings of this paper indicate that the research area of customer retention received most research attention during the first half of the years studied. On the other half, besides retention, development stage was truly relevant. Our analysis provides a roadmap to guide future research, as well as facilitate knowledge accumulation concerning the CRM in multichannel.N/

Enhancing Customer and Supplier Relationship through the Iterative Customer Relationship Management Process

CRM Process is considered the main critical success factor of CRM systems implementations, so special care should be given for each and every process in the organization supply chain for goal achievements.This paper provides an extensive review of the etiquette regarding the CRM processes. This review aims to increase the understanding of the different perspectives, levels of CRM processes, and CRM process models.The CRM Process either macro process or micro process. On the macro level, we consider merging Knowledge Management (KM) with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to have Customer knowledge Management (CKM) to reduce the risk of relationship failure and customer intelligence for the profitability of the organization supply chain. The knowledge management process starts with data collection, followed by intelligence generation and eventually, intelligence dissemination as an iterative process. On the other side the Micro-level process (Interaction Management) where its quality determined by Consistency, Relevancy, and Appropriateness. In the same context, other scholars classified the CRM process into three levels: (Customer facing level, The Functional level, and the Companywide level (Customer-oriented CRM process). Then, in the article, we are going to demonstrate the CRM process models and the proposed Iterative CRM process model by the author

Customer Relationship Management : Concept, Strategy, and Tools -3/E

Customer relationship management (CRM) as a strategy and as a technology has gone through an amazing evolutionary journey. After the initial technological approaches, this process has matured considerably – both from a conceptual and from an applications point of view. Of course this evolution continues, especially in the light of the digital transformation. Today, CRM refers to a strategy, a set of tactics, and a technology that has become indispensable in the modern economy. Based on both authors’ rich academic and managerial experience, this book gives a unified treatment of the strategic and tactical aspects of customer relationship management as we know it today. It stresses developing an understanding of economic customer value as the guiding concept for marketing decisions. The goal of this book is to be a comprehensive and up-to-date learning companion for advanced undergraduate students, master students, and executives who want a detailed and conceptually sound insight into the field of CRM

Cultural aspects of multi-channel customer management: A UK case study

Channel management is one CRM systems component much influenced by the behaviour of customers in relation to its implementation and use. The consumers’ behaviours, preferences, perceptions and expectations are crucial for the implementation and use of channel management. Customers’ contact with the organization’s multi-channels can occur at several touch points throughout the customer lifecycle. Customers’ behaviours may be differentiated according to the individual or micro level, but it might also differ at an ecological or macro level of analysis (Ramaseshan et al., 2006). In this paper the authors have conducted a case study in the UK to analyze customers’ behaviours at a macro level and customers channel choices, through out the customer lifecycle. The authors have used a Structurational Analysis model (Ali and Brooks, 2008) to identify the cultural factors (Ali, et al. 2008a) that influence multi-channel customer management in the UK