The Impact Of Using CRM Systems On Frontline Employees’Performance Via Mediating Mechanism

How to personalize the service to satisfy individual customers need is one of the hottopics in relationship marketing research. The customer relationship management (CRM)system has been touted as a primary tool for supporting frontline employees’ personalizedservices tasks. However, while numbers of companies have invested huge amounts ofmoney in CRM systems implementation, pervious research on the effect of using CRMsystems on individual employees’ performance seems to present mixed results. In order tofill this research gap, this study focuses on the IT-driven adaptive behavior of frontlineemployees in service context. I conducted a field study in a telecommunication serviceorganization in China and gathered multi-sourced data from both employees’ self-reportedas well as manager-reported surveys. The results suggest that the deep usage of CRMsystems has positive impacts on employees’ interpersonal and offering adaptive behavior,which in turn, enhance service performance. The results of this study highlight theimportance of adaptive behavior in mediating the relationship between CRM systemsusage and service performance.