Critical successful factors for the adoption of United States customer relationship management solutions in Chinese markets: Exploratory research in Taiwan and Shanghai

This dissertation focuses on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and its applicability in China and Chinese culture. The primary goal is to examine the critical success factors (CSFs) to successfully implement U.S. CRM solutions in Chinese markets. The research questions focus on: (1) Can U.S. CRM solutions be successfully transplanted into Chinese markets? (2) Do U.S. and Chinese markets share the same CSFs to implement CRM? (3) If variations of CSFs exist, why? Should we re-engineer the operations of the Chinese CRM users to follow U.S. CRM? Or should we localize U.S. CRM to fit Chinese business situations?; The major literature reviews include: Winer's (2001) CRM model, the elements to develop the market-relating capabilities by Day (2000), the CRM infrastructure introduced by Shoemaker (2001), the Customer Lifetime Value model and the Customer Pyramid model (Reinartz & Kumar, 2000; Jain & Singh, 2002), Newell's (2003) concept of Customer management of relationships, and eCRM (Greenberg, 2002, p.49).; This research employed qualitative approach. With literature reviews, this dissertation author established the conceptual model and conducted pilot study interviews. One purpose of the pilot study was to understand the contemporary CSFs of U.S. CRM implementation. Another purpose was to generate the interview questions for the formal research. The pilot study had completed seventeen interviews. The formal research had conducted thirty-two formal interviews. This dissertation author conducted the qualitative analyses and concluded the answers to the research questions.; Academic contributions of this research could be: (1) A summary of the contemporary CSFs of U.S. CRM implementation. (2) Identification of the CSFs of CRM implementation in Greater China areas. (3) Testing of qualitative marketing research in Greater China markets. (4) A comparison of the CSFs of the CRM implementation models between U.S. and Greater China markets, and their reasons for the differences.; Two potential managerial contributions are: (1) To identify the educational effect to provide Greater China markets the most updated CRM concepts. (2) With the crystallized CSFs list, the sales force in Greater China markets might formulate their own customized business strategies by implementing CRM.