The Impact of people and organisational culture on C.R.M. outcomes

In recent years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become more widely accepted as an important management discipline. However, the failure rate of CRM implementations is perhaps as high as 60%. It is acknowledged that success at CRM is a product of three key elements: people, process, and technology. This study focuses on people issues as a critical contributor to CRM success. A number of people issues are identified as being important to successful CRM implementation: senior management's endorsement and funding of the project, people's willingness to support the initiative, and a more customer-focused organisational culture. On the basis of a literature review, we provide an overview of key success factors for CRM implementation, and report on some of the output measures that could be using for evaluating CRM outcomes. We close by presenting a number of propositions linking people issues to CRM implementation outcomes.