Adoption of CRM: cross-cultural impact, a literature review

Abstract

In a competitive world there is a need for companies to maximise all their resources. One of the resources that is often overlooked is that of existing customer base. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an area that is becoming increasingly popular as it provides a method of maximising existing customer resource as well as adding value from the customers’ perception. CRM systems are used in many multinational organizations mainly to achieve customer loyalty and retention, increase cross selling and to improve customer satisfaction. A normative review of researches done to evaluate CRM systems shows that between 25 to 75 percent of CRM systems have failed (to various degrees) because of neglecting cultural awareness. Implementing CRM systems is a time consuming and expensive business, and the impact of failure can have a dramatic effect on the organization IT investment. Multinational organizations face the situation of how to adopt CRM implementation process according to differences in culture factors from country to country. Although there are studies that investigate the relation of cultural issues to general IT implementations, there is a noticeable lack of literature on the impact of cross-cultural on CRM implementation. This paper focuses on the impact of cross-cultural on CRM systems, and tries to summarize work done to explore the cultural awareness’ issues that influence CRM systems