Culture Barriers to Customer Relationship Management: An Assessment of the Impact of Customers Experience in Organisations

Abstract

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become widely accepted as an important management discipline in recent years. Successful CRM performance has been linked to an organisation's ability to identify and respond to potential barriers within organisational culture. In this study, we measure the culture of organisations implementing CRM. We identified four types of culture: customer-focused behaviours, information sharing, cross-functional teams, performance-based rewards, supportive relationships, adaptive and responsive attitudes to change, and a higher degree of risk-taking and innovation. Inadequate measurement is identified as a problem associated with CRM system implementations. The impression that an organisation is a growing and dynamic system, and the perception from outsiders, especially from customers, that the organisation is high potential, will encourage customers to participate in the CRM program. Our results indicate that more than 40% of the sampled organisations lack the organisational cultural that the extant literature would indicate is conducive for achieving CRM implementation success.