Page 287 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Customer Relationship Management

Notes is created when ways of talking, and therefore patterns of relationship change.” Customer
knowledge comes about through interactions between people within the company.
Thomas et al. (2001) also agree that mainstream thinking about knowledge management is too
simplistic. “Knowledge management is not just a matter of managing information. It is …
deeply social in nature and must be approached by taking human and social factors into account,”
(Thomas et al., 2001). The authors argue the most important aspects of a knowledge management
system is that it becomes a knowledge community; a place where people can encounter and
interact with others who discover, use and manipulate knowledge.
Maxfield & Lane (1997) provide a deeper discussion about the non-deterministic way that strategy
can unfold into business success through people. In this model, agents in the market pursue and
form “generative relationships” with each other. These relationships are perceived as creating
value for the agents involved. How agents perceive themselves, products and services in the
market and generative relationships is re-examined and reinterpreted as the agents themselves
understand and describe the market space.
Another way of thinking about this knowledge management debate is to pose a question. For
companies that deploy CRM systems, which contributed most to the benefits derived from the
CRM system:
1. Establishing strong causal linkages within the measurement model deployed or in use?
2. The use of CRM technology for some efficiency or effectiveness gain?
3. The socialization of the measurement framework within the culture of the company?
In extremely fluid market conditions, it seems unlikely that businesses can identify, in time, key
causal linkages in customer and employee behaviour when all the agents involved are
reinterpreting and redefining how they conceive of products, services, customers and
relationships. When the nouns are fluid, do the verbs make sense?

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
6. CRM activities depend on who is doing the …………………… and what activities are
being …………………….

7. Brand value is considered to be …………………….
8. Sales metrics is a way of …………………… CRM metrics.
9. Linking various customer-facing activities in a reasoned way to overall customer equity
and business success is the …………………… of CRM measurement.
10. According to …………………… , customer satisfactions that in which satisfaction is an
antecedent to repurchase behaviour and has several antecedents as well.

11.5 Attributes of a CRM Measurement Framework

What we need now are some attributes that help us understand what constitutes the key
dimensions of a measurement approach. Measurement frameworks can have three attributes or
vectors that describe them.
1. Field breadth
2. Field depth
3. Field tractability

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