A cultural approach to study customer relationship management (CRM) systems

Abstract

As this paper takes new approach to defining and studying CRM, it defines CRM as a business strategy that seamlessly integrates every aspect of business that touches customer. Going through CRM literature, the authors notice that, there are different objectives for CRM systems i.e. retains customers for long, increase sales to existing customers and candidate customers, and others. Over the last decade there has been a dramatic growth in the acquisition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems. However more recently, there has been an increase in reported CRM failures, suggesting that the implementation issues are not just technical, but encompass wider behavior and cultural factors. Multinational organization is faced by that problem, how they build a relationship with different customer in different culture contexts. The literature on culture provides a set of general concepts and ideas as a way of looking at the world. However, the typologies of culture have inherent weaknesses e.g. they do not reflect the variety of values and attitude that may exist in a country, nor do they explain how cultures have developed over time. These limitations will need to be borne in mind, as we consider potential culture impact on the use of information systems, particularly customer relationship management systems. The authors try to highlight the interaction between cultures in macro and micro level in the context of CRM systems. The authors conclude that social and cultural issues of the main area related to studying of CRM