حالت پذیرش CRM از طریق خدمات مالی در انگلستان: یک بررسی تجربی

In recent years, organisations have begun to realise the importance of knowing their customers better. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing customer related knowledge of increasing strategic significance. The successful adoption of IT-enabled CRM redefines the traditional models of interaction between businesses and their customers, both nationally and globally. It is regarded as a source for competitive advantage because it enables organisations to explore and use knowledge of their customers and to foster profitable and long-lasting one-to-one relationships. This paper discusses the results of an exploratory survey conducted in the UK financial services sector; it discusses CRM practice and expectations, the motives for implementing it, and evaluates post-implementation experiences. It also investigates the CRM tools functionality in the strategic, process, communication, and business-to-customer (B2C) organisational context and reports the extent of their use. The results show that despite the anticipated potential, the benefits from such tools are rather small.

In response to the growing threat from non-financial and non-traditional competitors, established financial services providers (FSPs) are using information technologies (IT) to deliver new financial products or to complement traditional ones, such as deposit, investment, credit, and insurance services. Customer relationship management (CRM) holds the promise to achieve such corporate objectives in this highly competitive arena. It involves the continuous use of refined information about current and potential customers in order to anticipate and respond to their needs and draws on a combination of business processes and IT to discover knowledge about the customers and answer questions such as “who are the customers?”, “what do they do?” and “what are they like?”. With such effective use of information and communication technologies, organisations can offer their customer a variety of products, lower prices, and personalised service, at the same time. In order to market effectively to the individual customer, companies gather information from both internal and external sources, and use it to provide a unified view (or profile) of the customer for targeted marketing purposes. Therefore, the effective management of information and knowledge is central and critical to the concept of CRM for • product tailoring and service innovation, e.g. web-sites tailored to customers needs, experience and other characteristics, and the development of mass customisation, • providing a single and consolidated view of the customer, • calculating the value of the customer, • establishing a strategy for a multi-channel based communication with the customer, • designing and developing personalised transactions. Different definitions of CRM put emphasis on different perspectives. CRM's technological perspective was stressed in [18], [20] and [24], its knowledge management perspective was emphasised in [13], and its business re-engineering and continuous improvement perspective was presented in [3]. Web-based CRM (also known as e-CRM) means that the sources of customer-related data are collected from the customer interactions with the Web and Internet-based systems. From a technological view, it is argued that there are three phases in CRM lifecycle [23]: • The integration of customer data from different sources. • The analysis in order to acquire a deeper understanding and knowledge about the customer. • The action for providing the required positive impact on customer relationships. The philosophy of CRM [19] is based on: • Relationship orientation. • Customer retention. • Superior customer value created through process management. • IT as the enabling technology for the discovery and management of customer knowledge. CRM encompasses the management of all possible ways that an organisation interacts with its customers. From receiving an order through the delivery of the products and services, CRM aims to co-ordinate all business processes that deal with customers and involves the collection, collation, and interpretation of customer data in order to define patterns of buying behaviour that can be used to support effective marketing programs [1] and [11]. The financial services industry had an early lead in CRM implementation as its transactions were essentially IT-based and contained valuable information about their customers [8] and [12]. Furthermore, most financial services companies have at least some kind of a customer-marketing database [2] and [15]. IT support for CRM systems varies in terms of the complexity, the difficulty in implementation, and the range of customer support. In its simplest form a CRM implementation may be a “Frequently Asked Questions,” (FAQ) page on the company's Web site, a call-centre, an e-mail newsletter, or a customer application download facility. More complex implementations of CRM range from highly complex, customisable merchant servers, to process integration though EDI, to virtual communities. CRM implementations include internal systems, such as customer databases, systems for interaction with consumers, such as home banking, as well as systems directed to business customers, such as order processing via B2B portals on the Internet [7], [9], [14], [16], [21], [22] and [25]. This paper is not concerned with the specific types of IT used in CRM implementation but investigates to what extent such systems have been deployed and used in FS organisations.

CRM approaches and applications are key factors for modern businesses. In the FSP sector, an information intensive industry, knowing more about the customers could prove to be a source of competitive advantage. Our survey indicated optimism about CRM's potential and future proliferation although the results supported findings from previous studies that financial institutions fail to adopt an appropriate approach to CRM implementation Therefore, FSP's need to: • Integrate CRM data and applications with their existing IS infrastructure as well with their business processes for use in customer related decision-making and management. • Develop a well thought metrics system, broader than just financial indicators, for CRM systems evaluation. • Develop a customer-centric culture. With respect to the strategic potential of collecting and analysing customer data, no one of the companies in the sample used any of this data to enter new markets. In an era of intensive competition, data mining is clearly under deployed. The development of new services and products is also an area that needs more attention. Clearly, the FSPs do not invest in CRM approaches and technologies to improve the core of their businesses. At the process level data shows a similar disappointing situation: it seems there is absolutely no effect on the internal processes and that operational cost, while limited, are the benefits. With respect to CRM support for B2C interactions, FSPs did not seem to take into account any CRM input in customising services, managing complaints, or providing support to their customers. As a result there was only limited impact of CRM on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The current level of its application was restricted to giving information to customers with no contribution to the core of customer management and services development. Moreover, communication channels are poorly developed for FSPs who largely rely on call centres. We therefore suggest that: • The design of services should include CRM technologies as well. The analysis of customer profiles will provide valuable input for new services. • The implementation of the services should be supported by changes in the organisational processes. Customers should be considered an integral part of business processes. Such changes should integrate all communication channels. • The evaluation metrics of CRM approaches and systems should be the same as those used for process management, customer satisfaction, and strategy development. • Integration with the customers should be a priority. Our study also indicated that there are no major technical obstacles. It is rather a matter of supporting a change management program and introducing new approaches and technologies drawing on prior lessons.