An Organizational Perspective on Critical Success Factors for Customer Relationship Management - A Descriptive Case Study

Despite much IS research on CRM in general and CRM-related critical success factors (CSFs) in particular, CRM projects are still subject to high failure rates. Most current CSF studies focus on a project or technological perspective. What they neglect, for instance, is an organizational perspective, i. e. the setting in which people execute operational CRM processes and which should be considered and/or established during CRM projects. In order to provide deeper insights into the organizational perspective, we conducted a descriptive case study within a CRM project at the German sales department of a globally acting company from the electronics and electrical engineering industry. We also had the chance to analyze two of the company’s so-called sales business types (SBTs), namely “product sales” and “solution sales”. We identified 13 organizational CSFs, compiled a ranking for each SBT, and conducted a cross-SBT analysis.