Nrg Working Paper Series a Study into the Foundations of Crm Success

Customer Relationship Management has attracted the attention of both marketing practitioners and researchers over the last decade. Despite, or maybe due to, the attention drawn to the subject, a clear agreement on what CRM is and especially how CRM should be developed remains lacking. It is now commonly understood that CRM involves technology, drives Marketing, Sales and Customer Services and is often approached as a business strategy to create value for an organization through the creation of profitable long-term customer relationships. Significant progress has been made in identifying and researching the components of CRM individually. The role of CRM applications, customer knowledge, customer satisfaction and a customer-centric strategy have all been subject of research lately. However, to our knowledge, no comprehensive research has been conducted into the role of these CRM components in achieving CRM success across the line. Also we have yet to find research that shows the relationship between each component. The goal of our research is to determine the impact of each component of CRM on each other and on CRM success. We will strive to do so by using qualitative research into successful CRM practitioners to create research propositions. These propositions will in turn be tested in a quantitative analysis of data collected from 250 Dutch companies. Through building a Structural Equation Model (Sem-model), we determine the role and influence of the key components of CRM on each other and on CRM success.