The Empirical Study Of The Influence Of CRM Process On The Marketing Performance Of Enterprise

In recent years, it has been a hot issue to the academicians and practitioners how to effectively deal with customer relations. Enterprises come to realize that different customers produce different economic values. Correspondently enterprises adjust their customer supply and communication strategy. Therefore, in fact, marketing is transforming from product-centered or brand-centered to customer-centered.At present, many enterprises in service industry apply CRM system to make profit for them. While the existing research mainly focus on the constitution of the CRM strategy such as the relation between degree of satisfaction of customers and performance (Kamakura et al., 2002), between degree of faithfulness and profitability(Reinartz and Kumar, 2000), heterogeneity in customer rate of return(Niraj, Gupta, and Narasimhan, 2001) and customer faithfulness plan. However, the research and study on the implementation of CRM are severely deficient, which arouse broad concerns in the academic circle. There is no obvious evidence about the characteristics of successful CRM and the reason for possible failure. Furthermore, the both the existing academic literatures and CRM applications fail to point out what on earth is needed to implement CRM process.During the recent years many domestic enterprises adopt CRM to improve customer service, especially widely the service industries such as finance, tele-communication, etc., some of the enterprises look on CRM as investment in technology and software and their implementation of CRM remains at the level IT, lacking the overall strategy of expending CRM to all the departments, which bring about the difficulty of implement CRM in practice and limited accomplishment. While there are some enterprises see CRM in broad vision and with more ambition, they hope to develop reasonable and effective relations with customers through CRM. Besides, some enterprises operate CRM process to a greater degree than other ones. Then, is the degree of implementation proportional to the marketing performance? For this, my study take the degree to which enterprises operate CRM system as independent variable with the aim to study the influence the degree of implementation has on marketing performance of the enterprises and meanwhile to study whether the relation is subject to regulation of the compatible institution of CRM and technology.In the study, we hand out printed questionnaires and mail digital questionnaires to the subject. After pilot study and revision of the content, 300 questionnaires are sent out to marketing manager or executive in charge of customers relations, 189 copies are returned. 122 effective samples are sorted after canceling 77 copies of questionnaire insufficiently and incompletely filled in. therefore, the effective response rate is 40.7%. most of them are from state-owned enterprises most of whom deal in telecommunication and retail s industry mostly in a large scale. Consequently the date is very persuasive to the solution of the research problem. Based on the above mentioned, we get the following conclusion.Firstly, the data collected is in favor of our definition of initiation, maintenance and termination stage. Then we adopt the scale of Werner Reinaritz, Manfred Krafft, and Wayne D. Hoyer (2004) to evaluate the degree to which the service industry implement CRM program in these respects. It is very important in that on the one hand it is the first step towards defining what constitutes the standards of CRM process. As mentioned above, the academicians and the practitioners have different manners on how to define CRM process. The construct need a good measure on which a common base is built. Thus we can compare the results of CRM between different companies and between different studies. The index can be used to guide deeper studies in this respect.Secondly, our findings show that the three stages of CRM have a obvious effect on improving the performances of an enterprises. This indicates that the adoption of CRM system obviously affect the performance of the enterprise. To be exact, the respective effects of the three stages are different to a certain degree, greatest in the stage of maintenance(0.576), then the stage of maintenance(0.501)and weakest(0.338) in the stage of termination. Therefore, CRM are seemingly able to return what they invest in CRM actions as they expect. Some forms of actions can improve performance, others don't. As for the stage of termination, a possible explanation for weak influence is that enterprise make mistake of Type II, namely, the enterprise are not willing to establish relations with those unprofitable customers, which is not unusual in China's service industry, for example, the former China's network communication companies still spend a large amount of money to maintain those customers whose sales are below 10 RMB yuan per month (petty sum customers). In this stage enterprises implement CRM process without high efficiency.The third finding is that the management of CRM toward customers in the CRM-compatible institutions has an obvious influence on the marketing performance. First of all, significant interaction exists between the adjustment of CRM-compatible institution and the stage of initiation and termination. Therefore, only when the company drafts supportive policy and plans to support CRM behavior, can its effectiveness improve. At the initiation of relation with customers, CRM plays a negative role. However, it will play a positive role in maintaining the relations with customers, as what we expected. Someone point out that CRM has been perfected in the maintenance period, which give the initiation and termination period the greatest potential to improve. This deduction has been proved correct by statistics. Without proper institutional or supportive policy, it's hardly possible for CRM to produce the expected influence. Therefore, it's not enough for the company to operate CRM only. It should put all things in order and make a supportive policy to support this process. It also demonstrates that in the further study of CRM's influence, enterprises should play a key role.The forth finding is that our statistics are consistent with the existing statistics. These statistics show that the result of the application of CRM technology is not exactly the same as we expect. At the beginning of customers'management, CRM play a negative role in adjustment. That is to say, the CRM doesn't bring positive return to the company at the beginning. Instead, its negative role outweighs the positive one. Only in the maintenance period does the CRM's influence come into fore. Unexpectedly, CRM doesn't bring any positive effect to the company at the stage of termination, which has something to do with company's reluctance to give up their customers in hand. This is a great finding, because it proves that it's hardly possible to benefit from the investment of CRM technology. however, as long as we can overcome the difficulties at the stage of initiation, we can benefit from the technological investment. Because the CRM tech investment is a new try, we may meet with opposite result. However, the success of CRM lies not only in our advanced technology. We have emphasized this aspect. The company's effort will be disappointing, at least, in a short period if it take this into consideration. Especially, the successful operation needs personnel of high quality, that is maybe why at the beginning it plays a negative role. Perhaps, at the stage of initiation, the customers would rather contact with our stuff than technology system. However, it's not worthwhile to use technological system to manage the low-valued clients. As we found the performance of the CRM varies from stage to stage, we must conduct a very exhaustive study of each stage of the process.