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Putting market-facing technology to work: Organizational drivers of CRM performance

Marketing Letters volume 21, pages 365–383 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

A large proportion of firms that adopt customer relationship management (CRM) technology find it challenging to integrate CRM technology into their core marketing processes and utilize CRM strategically to appreciably improve their performance. The authors conceptualize a model to understand the drivers of superior CRM performance after CRM technology has been adopted by a firm and examine strategic utilization of CRM technology as driven by user acceptance and proficiency in the form of employee buy-in and expertise. Top management championship practices, employee information technology (IT) skills, and CRM knowledge are identified and examined as key building blocks toward strategic utilization. The empirical test of the conceptual model is based on a mail survey of North American firms that have adopted information technology-based CRM systems. The results, based on random effects model, show that strategic utilization of CRM technology leads to higher performance when there is an emphasis on using it to manage business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer relationships, user expertise (but not buy-in) impacts CRM performance through strategic utilization, and top management championship practices, CRM knowledge, and employee IT skills impact strategic utilization through buy-in and expertise.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. For example, see Liker et al. (1992) and Cooper and Zmud (1990) for evidence of gap between adoption and assimilation of computer-aided design and material requirements planning technologies, respectively.

  2. That is, (1) relational management knowledge, (2) collaboration management knowledge, (3) market environment knowledge, (4) customer profitability knowledge, (5) employee IT skills, (6) top management championship practices, (7) buy-in, (8) strategic utilization, (9) expertise, and (10) CRM performance.

  3. Specifically, goodness of fit index ranged from 0.92 to 0.94, comparative fit index ranged from 0.97 to 0.98, nonnormed fit index was 0.97 in both cases, and root mean square error of approximation ranged from 0.060 to 0.066 (statistically equivalent to 0.05 in both cases). Although the χ 2 statistic was statistically significant in the models, the ratios of χ 2 to degrees of freedom were 1.89 and 2.32 for the two models. An Appendix with a comprehensive list of items for all constructs is available upon request.

  4. Out of these 151 firms, 17 used custom-made in-house CRM software, five used Peoplesoft, four used Oracle, and three firms each used SAP and Epicor.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Business Administration, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Amit Saini

  2. Smeal College of Business Administration, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Rajdeep Grewal

  3. Amsterdam Business School, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Jean L. Johnson

Authors
  1. Amit Saini
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  2. Rajdeep Grewal
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  3. Jean L. Johnson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amit Saini.

Additional information

The authors thank the Marketing Science Institute (Grant #4-1204) and the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) at Pennsylvania State University for their support for this research.

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Saini, A., Grewal, R. & Johnson, J.L. Putting market-facing technology to work: Organizational drivers of CRM performance. Mark Lett 21, 365–383 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-009-9096-z

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Keywords

  • CRM
  • CRM knowledge
  • Employee IT skills
  • Top management championship
  • CRM performance
  • Buy-in
  • Expertise
  • Strategic utilization
  • Customer relationship management