“The Impact of E-CRM on Organizational and Individual Behaviour” by Letaifa Essay (Critical Writing)

Summary of the Article

“The Impact of E-CRM on Organizational and Individual Behaviour: The Effect of the Remuneration and Reward System” is the article under consideration, written by a PhD student in the sphere of business administration, Soumaya Ben Letaifa, and a professor of marketing, Jean Perrien. This work presents a thorough analysis of how exactly electronic customer relationship management (E-CRM) may influence organizational and even individual behaviour. The writers of this article choose Canadian banks with their own custom-driven culture to conduct this research. The article starts with a proper theoretical material that explains the essence of the CRM shift and then introduces methodology of research and its results. The authors underline that the evaluation system and employee rewards are forgotten (Letaifa & Perrien, 2007, p. 13), this is why it is crucially important to offer a new, really effective electronic customer relationship management to improve the current state of affairs at banks.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management and Its Essence

The creation of any strategy that may touch customer relationship management is a very significant step for any manager, as it requires proper level of knowledge, abilities to listen and evaluate, and be able to grow (Rajola, 2003). Moreover, the relationships between a company and customers should point out the strategic evaluation of further development of relationships. For this purpose the communication within a company should be supported with principles of CRM along with knowledge and collaboration management. The authors of the article under consideration focus on these aspects and underline the necessity to focus on customer and marketing segmentation in order to achieve good results while implementing any market-oriented strategy. Marketing research, in particular, helps to predict possible risks and dangers for a company in the long or short run. Anyway, CRM is a kind of business strategy; this is why implementations in the sphere of technology only will not be effective at all. As a result, it can be said that E-CRM may have certain impact on both individual and organizational behaviour. When one step in the chosen management strategy is taken correctly, it is possible to take another one; only under such conditions positive outcomes will be observed, and one satisfied customer will certainly bring three more customers to use the same service (Raab et al., 2008). Furthermore, the necessity to protect informational technologies of a company is a great concern, which can serve than as an additional guarantee for constructive elaboration of internal and external relationships. To comprehend better the essence of how the strategies of CRM work, 10 interviews were conducted: the comparison of different points of view concerning heterogeneous clienteles allowed making the best use of marginal contributions. The chosen way was justified, good results were achieved.

Ideas to Investigate E-CRM

The authors of the article about electronic customer relationship management prefer qualitative methods to any other methods in their research. To their minds, the case study is the most successful approach that can be chosen to investigate and analyze some complex phenomena. There are two major levels, at which triangulation of information was presented: (1) triangulation of data sources’ types, they may be primary and secondary; and (2) triangulation in the frames of a certain series of information. Almost the same methods were chosen by many other researchers, who wanted to investigate the same topic. Thus in the era of high technologies more and more cases of technological transformations and changes should be taken into account by companies, in order to improve credibility as well as capabilities in work with customers. The investigation of Schoder and Madeja may serve as a good example of reliable research that aims at answering one simple question – whether customer relationship management may be a successful factor within the sphere of electronic commerce (Schoder & Madeja, 2004). Here one cannot but agree that social networking and encouragement of collaboration within world’s major companies is the theme of great importance for further success. Such deep analysis of information helps to clear up what is the most significant point in customer relationship management; as in many other researchers, the major idea is all about customer’s satisfaction and his/her cooperation with other customers (Khalifa, 2005). Such custom-related chain of relationships helps to determine later the main advantages or disadvantages in decision-making within a company. Finally, it is necessary to underline that the heterogeneous managers and their heterogeneous clients become the major key to valid outcomes of the chosen methods.

Outcomes of Research

The work by Letaifa and Perrien is one of those, which present clear results of their investigation in rather short but still comprehensible form. The researchers made use of the interviews, analyzed the effectiveness of Web sites and their possible improvement, and introduced how exactly the remuneration and reward system may affect E-CRM. The chosen E-CRM strategy underlines the fact that customer knowledge is the major one in comprehending benefits, which are appreciated by the customer; this is why individual behaviour plays a significant role as well as organizational one that helps to re-organize work as it should be. What is more, it is not actually surprising for the post-industrial society where the main product is information. IT innovations should follow the requirements of customers. It is quite possible to assist customer by means of improving call center, this is why lots of researchers pay attention to this very factor (Scullin et al., 2002). Of course, lots of changes within qualitative employment because of E-CRM have already taken place (Lilischkis, 2003), but still, all these changes usually cause some new outcomes; in the research under consideration, the results demonstrate that all changes do not have an effect on remuneration and reward systems if individual and organizational behaviour is not taken into consideration. This very framework will be effective only if all the above-mentioned issues will be used, analyzed, and developed.

Conclusion

Electronic customer relationship management is usually defined as the use of the Internet in order to grow considerably and develop proper relations with customers (Keillor, 2007). The major purposes of the research under consideration were to find out and analyze the effects of E-CRM within one concrete institution (one of the Canadian banks). With the help of several qualitative methods, the issue was investigated, and clear results were received. In spite of the fact that E-CRM is rather young sphere, its rapid growth promotes numerous activities to examine its essence and effects (Romano & Fjermestad, 2001). The results of the investigation open new doors to deeper investigation of the same issues under heterogeneous conditions. Lots of banks still pass some tests, the results of which may considerably influence further development of the events. In general, the chosen manner of conducting research in this work is rather successful and may serve a good source of information for further investigations in the same sphere.

Reference List

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