Customer relationship management strategic application and organizational effectiveness; an empirical investigation / Dean Elmuti, Heather Jia and Dane Gray

This study was undertaken to study the impact of customer relationship management (CRM) as a strategic approach on overall organizational effectiveness and to identify barriers that affect CRM success. A survey of customer relationship management practices was developed and distributed to 500 randomly selected financial service providers in the United States. Follow‐up interviews were also conducted with key managers among several financial service providers. The results show that organizations generally considered themselves successful at managing their customer relationship management programs. However, while they have achieved significant improvement in customer responsiveness and performance, they have not reached the order of magnitude of improvements ascribed to customer relationship management.
This exploratory empirical investigation provides insight into the effectiveness of implementing a customer relationship management strategy approach for increasing the probability of success of the CRM approach and identifies areas that need further investigation.