Identifying the Interrelationships of Critical Success Factors for Customer Relationship Management

An effective Customer Relationships Management (CRM) implementation benefits firms to achieve competitive advantages over others by enhancing customer retention, loyalty, satisfaction, and growing. A successful CRM implementation has become essential owing to the massive percentage of failures that occur. This year, firms are expected to spend more than $27 billion on implementing CRM. While a significant amount of study has been conducted into CRM implementations, particularly with respect to Critical Success Factors (CSFs), only a minority of the implementations have been successful. It is argued that one of the reasons for this is the improper assessment of interrelationships of CSFs prior starting the CRM implementation. CSFs are interlinked. They represent factors at nodes in a network of influences, which need to be examined together in order to determine best practice, identify study issues and reflect on strategy. Therefore, the aim of this study is to determine the interrelationships between the identified CSFs associated with CRM implementation, which revealed the important of these relationships for the success of the implementation. The study involves practical work based on one particular national context; the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).