Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Family Businesses & CRM: A Study by Marjorie Cooper and Nancy Upton

Family businesses believe that excellent customer service is critical to the future of their businesses. Yet little research into the customer relationship management (CRM) practices of family businesses has been performed. In a matched sample study, Dr. Cooper (marketing department) and Dr. Upton (family business institute) examine CRM implementations among family and non-family firms. Surprisingly, they find that family firms attribute significantly less importance to CRM than non-family businesses; yet family firms perceive their knowledge of CRM and their success when they do implement to be equivalent to non-family businesses. Family businesses are significantly less likely to have embarked on any CRM initiatives and are also more likely to use less innovative CRM techniques than non-family businesses. If family businesses are serious about the importance of customer service to achieve success, this study suggests that they carefully consider how they deliver that service.

Impact of Inter-Functional Conflict on Implementing CRM: A Study by Marjorie Cooper and Carol Gwin

The goal of developing and maintaining strong customer relationships is widely recognized, but a well-intentioned customer relationship management (CRM) strategy can be derailed because of poor implementation. CRM projects require huge financial and resource investments, so it is especially critical that these projects be completed on-time, within budget, and with full project scope actualized. To achieve these objectives, the issues of cross-functional integration and the reduction of conflict must be addressed.

The conditions of employees’ working on too many projects at once, managers’ measuring performance on individual task rather than project success, a crisis-instigating company culture, and the use of teams whose members can represent a variety of functional perspectives all affect the propensity of the company to exhibit differing goals and values according to functional area.

Drs. Cooper & Gwin find that such situations feed cross-functional conflict that can lead to open hostility. They hypothesize that higher levels of such conflict interfere with the successful implementation of a CRM initiative within the organization as measured by several dependent project success factors.