Organizational Change and Customer Relationship Management Success

The shift from a product-oriented business strategy to a customer-focused one has been a major change agent in companies recently. Many companies have invested heavily in technologies enabling a customer-focused relationship marketing strategy. However, there are mixed results as to how successful firms have been in implementing customer relationship management systems. The challenge of managing organizational change has been raised as a potentially important factor affecting the successful outcome of CRM efforts. In order to get more insight into organizational change in the CRM context, we conducted an exploratory single case study, and identified several change events on different observational levels. Our research results give support to previous findings that before implementing CRM technologies, a company should first change the organization to become more customer-focused. This again requires the re-engineering of many key customer relationship management processes. Our findings suggest that to succeed, one should first identify existing, concurrent change processes and their related change entities. Then one could evaluate, whether change events triggered by these processes might have an affect on one another in a way, which could endanger the successful outcome of the CRM implementation.