Enhancing Collaborative CRM with Mobile Technologies

Mobile technology offers a high potential to significantly transform the ways how a company can interact with their customers and even with own employees. In recent years researchers started to analyze those potentials from the perspective of customer relationship management (CRM) but mainly concentrated on traditional business-to-customer (B2C) relationships. The concept of collaborative CRM extends this view of traditional CRM to virtual organizations and networked businesses. While the concept of collaborative CRM has been discussed by several authors already, the impact of mobile technology is still open to research. This paper investigates the role of mobile technology in collaborative CRM based on existing research, scenarios and supporting systems. The goal is to increase insight about the current role of mobile devices such as smartphones or personal digital agents (PDA) in collaborative CRM business scenarios and the support of these scenarios by CRM systems. From the broad scope of collaborative CRM the focus of this research is on collaboration with customers. The findings show that current mobile scenarios merely incorporate the collaborative CRM concept and that CRM systems provide only basic functionalities for incorporating mobile devices in collaborative CRM processes.