دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله عوامل بحرانی و مزایا در اجرای مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری (نشریه الزویر 2007)

عوامل و مزایای مهم در پیاده سازی مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری

Critical Factors and Benefits in the Implementation of Customer Relationship Management

Abstract

In competitive consumer markets, building and maintaining a good relationship with customers is essential to long-term business survival. Currently, firms are applying Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to facilitate the maintenance of this relationship. This investigation applies interview survey methods to explore the relationship between Business Process Reengineering (BPR), Organizational Learning, Relationship Quality, and Organizational Performance in the implementation of a CRM system. Among these factors, BPR and Organizational Learning are the first steps in the construction of CRM. BPR involves staff reward and training, organizational structure, and information technology tools. Organizational learning involves commitment to learning, shared visions and open-mindedness. Relationship Quality involves trust, satisfaction and commitment, which are intended to be increased by the implementation. The Balanced Scorecard approach is applied to the measurement of Organizational Performance, involving the internal business process, learning and growth, customer, and financial performance perspectives. Overall, the study supports the proposition relationship between the four perspectives. The actual implementation of CRM is believed by the respondents to contribute to an improvement in relationship quality and organizational performance, and the consensus is that implementation of a CRM system should be preceded by BPR and organizational learning.

1 Introduction

In competitive consumer markets, customer choice decisions are at the root of business survival, focusing attention on the attraction and retention of customers through personalized service. Rosenberg & Czepiel (1984) estimate that the cost of winning a new customer is five times higher than that of maintaining an existing customer, while Reichheld & Sasser (1990) estimate that the retention of an additional 5% of customers, can increase profit by nearly 100%. Maintenance of the customer relationship is therefore cost-effective marketing, and has become a key aspect of most firm’s business strategy, prompting extensive deployment of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems (Morgan & Hunt, 1994; Kim et al., 2003).

The nature of CRM aims to maximize customer value in the long term, by focusing business processes, marketing and customer service on client relationship maintenance, through the coordinating agency of an information technology (IT) system. Implementation of such a system is not a panacea, and is not, of itself, sufficient to transform a productionoriented organization into a customer-oriented one (Kanji, 2002; Chang, 2005), which will require a wide-ranging overhaul of organizational structures, employee training and reward system, as well as appropriate IT support (Chen & Popovich, 2003). This fundamental redesign of business processes is described as Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Earl et al. (1995) state that, ‘BPR has meant redesigning existing business processes and implementing new ones.’ Davenport (1993) considers BPR as process innovation, changing all business processes and redesigning them. BPR aims at substantial gains in organizational performance by a ‘ground-up’ redesign of core business processes, discarding existing processes and inventing new ones, rather than incrementally improving existing processes (Attaran, 2004). Since the CRM provides a means to acquire and distribute personalized customer information, its usefulness will depend on the organization’s ability to exploit that information in innovative new products and services (Chen & Ching, 2004), which in turn will be dependent on the speed of employee and organizational learning, a key to survival in innovative consumer markets (Stata, 1989; Fulmer, 1994; Chang, 2006).

Peter Drucker (1954) states, in The Practice of Management that ‘the only effective definition of a business aim is to create customers!’, since customer satisfaction and trust will bring repeat purchases to the firm and hence improve the firms’ organizational performance. Increasingly, firms are recognizing the value of establishing close relationships with customers as a means of increasing retention. Smith (1998) defines relationship quality as the overall assessment of the strength of a relationship and the extent to which it meets the needs and expectations of the parties based on the past history of successful or unsuccessful encounters or events. Firms are realizing that the intangible aspects of a relationship may not be easily duplicated by the competition, thus providing a unique competitive advantage (Kanji, 1998; Roberts et al., 2003). CRM systems help firms maintain relationships with customers and suppliers, with these associated advantages.