Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which has spread since the mid 1990s, has been a core activity of many corporations seeking to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. To take a quote from Fred Reichheld, a world leader in customer loyalty ...
Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which has spread since the mid 1990s, has been a core activity of many corporations seeking to ensure customer satisfaction and retention. To take a quote from Fred Reichheld, a world leader in customer loyalty and CRM, business growth starts with customer loyalty and there are good profits as a driving force for long-term growth and bad profits as being merely inflated short-term earnings. Unfortunately, many companies these days cannot tell the difference between good profits and bad profits and this is why they are doomed to face growth huddles eventually. In this vein, if a business looks to attain growth sustainability, it should become one that customers are willing to recommend to others. Considering that good business performance relies on customers, it is reasonable to review CRM activities from the customer's perspective rather than from the business' viewpoint and to pay greater attention to what customers themselves experience from CRM activities. Nevertheless, much of the previous literature on CRM focused on how the adoption of the CRM system affects business performance, mostly from the corporate perspective, neglecting the customer's perspective. Therefore, this empirical study attempted to find out whether and how the three key elements of CRM activities, Marketing, Sales, and Service, as presented by Kalakota & Robinson and Raaen, can affect some of the building blocks of Keller's Customer-Based Brand Equity Pyramid, going beyond the sheer concept of retaining and maintaining the existing customers and even reaching over to increased brand loyalty and customer recommendations. Major results from the study are summarized as follows.
First, each of the key components of business CRM activities, Marketing, Sales, and Service was proven to affect brand identity and brand meaning (brand performance and brand imagery), respectively, in different ways. Namely, all the components had positive influences on brand identity in the order of decreasing influence: Marketing, Service, and Sales, while for brand performance, the most positive influencing factor was Marketing followed by Service and for brand imagery, that was Service followed by Marketing. On the other hand, Sales was not a significant influencing factor on brand performance and brand imagery, respectively. This suggests a possibility that there may be some negative views towards Service among customers.
Second, it was found that business CRM activities had influences on various levels of brand equity from the lower level, brand identity to the higher levels, brand loyalty and NPS.
Third, it was demonstrated that all the CRM components exerted stronger influences on NPS and brand loyalty through an emotional path where brand imagery is the driving force than through a rational path where brand performance plays a central role. This indicates that customers' evaluation made rationally at the cognitive level is less influential than customer feelings at the emotional level, as can be seen in many examples where bad profits at the expense of customer satisfaction eventually result in creating customer detractors.
Fourth, the results from the analysis of CRM's effect on the dependant variable of brand loyalty revealed that only by pursuing to produce 'good profits' businesses can sustain long-term growth and profit from good long-term relationships with customers, promoting favorable word of mouth effects, in turn resulting in enhanced brand loyalty through customer recommendations.
In sum, in light of the findings that among the business CRM activity elements influencing brand loyalty and NPS, the most influential one was found to be Service, one important implication for businesses engaging in CRM activities is that they need to create and implement a service management system that focuses on building customer based brand equity upon which to strengthen brand loyalty and further utilize the tremendous value of customers who are willing to make recommendations to others.