Impacting the CRM - Performance Link: The Management of Human Resources and Customer Knowledge

Götz, O.; Hoffmann, A.; Hoyer, W. D.; Krafft, M.

Abstract
Customer relationships and customer equity are seen as one of the most valuable assets that companies have. Several studies provide evidence of a positive relationship between customer oriented processes and companies performance. Therefore, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become an effective approach to collect, analyze, and translate valuable customer information into managerial action. However, for many firms CRM initiatives do not result in the expected outcomes. What factors distinguish firms that are more successful in CRM implementation? It is widely accepted that CRM performance is greatly influenced by the interplay between people, process, and technology. More specifically, guided by the resource-based view, we investigate the impact of human resources and customer knowledge management on CRM performance. We identified five pertinent dimensions of customer-oriented human resource management, namely customer-oriented leadership, recruiting, training, reward systems and employee empowerment. Hypotheses are developed and tested with survey-based data from a set of 196 German companies in several industries, including banking/insurance, energy and catalogue sellers. The empirical support for our hypothesized effects points to the large influence especially of leadership and reward systems on the degree of CRM implementation. In addition, CRM implementation supports the capability of creating superior customer intelligence. The results enriches our understanding of how CRM outcomes are influenced by organizational behavior, concerning the role of human resources and customer knowledge.

Keywords
human resource management; CRM; customer knowledge