استراتژی های تطبیقی فناوری اطلاعات برای مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction. A CRM strategy involves the entire enterprise and is employed on an ongoing basis. Despite the fact that CRM projects incur huge expenditures, a large percentage fails to achieve the stated objectives. Failure in CRM initiatives could be avoided if a firm's CRM strategies are intelligently linked with its employees, customers, channels, and IT infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on those linkages, particularly on the linkages between an organization's CRM strategies and its IT infrastructure. Even though the relationships between IT and business strategies have been extensively explored in the IT alignment literature, prior research has not addressed how a firm's CRM strategies are aligned with its IT infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate the issues relating to CRM-IT alignment based on an in-depth case study of a large, well-known Internet travel agency

The forces arising from globalization, deregulation, increasing competition, maturing markets, demanding customers, and industry convergence [7] are compelling businesses to treat customers as a critical source of profitability and sustainable growth. Relationship marketing [2], [3] and [37], also called customer relationship management (CRM), has been proposed to address the issues arising due to these changes. Relationship marketing focuses on attracting, maintaining, and enhancing customer relationships [2]. The goal of CRM is to develop long-term and mutually beneficial relationships in which the buyer and the seller focus on generating more satisfying exchanges [38]. This can be achieved by increasing communication with the right customer with the right offer, through the right channel, at the right time [40]. Interest in CRM has grown rapidly due to high customer expectations, increased interest in one-stop shopping, attention to one-to-one relationships, churn in customer pool, customers' knowledge about competitors, advent of new software infrastructure, compressed marketing cycles, and increased cost of marketing. CRM is the overall process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering superior customer value and satisfaction [23]. A CRM strategy should involve the entire enterprise, rather than only the marketing department, and should be employed on an ongoing basis [30]. Even with worldwide expenditures on CRM projects rapidly approaching the $100 billion mark, 60 to 80% of CRM projects fail to achieve their objectives [21]. Reasons for such failures include: i) wrongly assuming that CRM simply is a technology initiative, ii) losing vision of customer-centricity, iii) inadequate support of top management toward CRM initiatives, iv) underestimating the importance of change management, and v) misunderstanding customer lifetime value [21]. Even though CRM technology is important, the main focus should be on managing customer relationships. A firm should not lose its vision of customer-centricity, which empowers it to have an in-depth understanding of its customer base across all functions, divisions, and communication channels. There must be adequate support of top management for CRM initiatives to be successful. Companies should not underestimate the importance of change management that is inherent in any CRM project. CRM initiatives often ignore the fact that it is the people within the organization who make them successful [21]. These people need to have the right customer service skills and knowledge of the purpose and functions of CRM. Also, they must be prepared for the technological changes that would affect the way they work. CRM strategies should recognize that not all customer relationships are equally profitable. The focus of CRM should be on serving those customers who have the potential of delivering the highest lifetime value to the firm [39]. Failures in CRM can be avoided if a firm's CRM strategies are intelligently linked with its employees, customers, channels, and IT infrastructure [5], [7] and [40]. In this paper we concentrate on those linkages, particularly on the linkages between an organization's CRM strategies and its IT infrastructure. Even though the IT alignment literature [16], [18], [33], [34] and [36] has explored the linkages between IT and business strategies extensively, prior research has not addressed how CRM strategies are linked with the IT infrastructure. In this paper, our objective is to investigate this linkage (CRM -IT alignment). The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we discuss why IT alignment is important for CRM. In Section 3, we review the extant literature in IT alignment. In Section 4, we present a case study and in Section 5, we analyze the case to understand IT alignment issues in CRM. Section 6 summarizes and concludes the paper.

This paper addresses IT alignment issues in CRM. Based on a detailed case analysis, we find that IT alignment in CRM is quite unique. Unlike the current IT alignment literature (as discussed in Section 3), which focuses only on OLTP systems, IT infrastructure in CRM uses both OLTP and OLAP protocols. These two processing protocols are vastly different from one another. They differ in data viewing mechanisms, in query complexity, in reporting mechanisms, and in their objectives (e.g., OLTP is used to manage transaction-oriented business tasks while OLAP enables business planning and decision support). Our analysis reveals that IT alignment in CRM is dynamic and follows an evolutionary path. The evolution goes through stages starting from “what happened” to responding to customers in real time. The stages of evolution are characterized by different enterprise integration philosophies, different enabling CRM technologies, different CRM analytics, and so on. The stages are also marked by distinct CRM events that toggle between pull CRM events and push CRM events. All these make the evolution process quite complicated. We found that IT alignment in CRM switches its anchors as it evolves. That is, in some stages, it anchors on business strategy, and in others it anchors on IT strategy. Each time, it changes its perspectives of alignment. In this study, we conducted an in-depth case analysis of a large company, which leverages its powerful IT infrastructure for pursuing CRM initiatives, to develop the conceptual underpinnings of CRM-IT alignment. An interesting future direction would be to conduct a field study with a larger sample of companies and see if our observations hold.