e-CRM refers to the Internet-based CRM system. According to Greenburg (2001), "e-CRM is the twenty-first-century version of CRM and the two are now inseparable."It is a revolutionary way of managing customer relations. The essence of e-CRM is to build...
e-CRM refers to the Internet-based CRM system. According to Greenburg (2001), "e-CRM is the twenty-first-century version of CRM and the two are now inseparable."It is a revolutionary way of managing customer relations. The essence of e-CRM is to build a business environment in which a variety of the company's activities, including dealing with customers, marketing, sales, communication, and services, can be conducted through e-channels based on electronic technology (Feinberg and Kadam, 2002).
Although the number of studies on e-CRM is gradually increasing, no measure to assess and evaluate e-CRM activities with reliable degrees of accuracy has been developed yet (Feinberg et al., 2002). This study was conducted in order to develop a set of tools that can measure the performance of e-CRM activities in the tourism industry based on a comprehensive approach to the concepts and structural elements of e-CRM activities performed by tourism-related companies (hotels, restaurants, travel agencies, and airlines). In doing so, this study applied the categories of the CRM activities made in the existing literature, which are: Marketing, Sales, Service, Support, Information Technology, and System (Kincaid, 2003; Ngai, 2005; West, 2001). These categories were applied to the e-CRM activities to give birth to the following five categories: e-Marketing, e-Sales, e-Service, e-Support, and e-System that can be used to measure the quality of e-CRM activities.
In order to develop the measures for e-CRM activities, this study used the expert survey based on the Delphi method. The Delphi method was chosen since the goal of this study was to develop a set of measures to evaluate the e-CRM activities by collecting opinions and information from e-CRM experts and finding the consensus among them. Instead of asking open-ended questions, the primary questionnaire for the Delphi analysis involved a set of questions structuralizing the categories and elements of evaluation already excerpted from the literature survey (Kincaid, 2003; Murry, 1995). Structuralized questions based on information collected from preliminary expert surveys used in the literature were deemed to facilitate the process of finding the consensus of opinions among various experts in the Delphi survey than open-ended questions. Finally, the set of e-CRM activity measures developed using the Delphi method was then applied to the survey involving the tourism-related businesses and were analyzed and verified in order to assess the reliability and Validity of the e-CRM activity measures for the tourism industry. Employees who work in charge of e-CRM in the tourism industry served as the participants in this study. A sample consisting of employees working in charge of e-CRM in the hotel, travel agency, airline and restaurant industries was established. The reason these four particular sectors were chosen is because these are where e-CRM is commonly practiced and are parts of the tourism industry capable of providing data for verification and research.