| As consumer shopping preferences shift and evolve from a single shopping channel to multichannel demands, retailers need to understand how to deliver improved performance of omnichannel strategy: a seamless customer experience that aligns a retailer's brand, product assortment, and marketing initiatives across all channels. The complexities of moving from a single or multichannel retailing experience to deliver an omnichannel retail strategy requires retailers to merge their channel customer data and technologies. Customer relationship management (CRM) resources, such as customer orientation, customer-centric organizational system, and CRM technology, provide retailers with a holistic customer view that may allow retailers to optimize their omnichannel strategy performance. The purpose of this nonexperimental quantitative correlational study was to examine relationships between CRM resources: (a) customer orientation, (b) customer-centric organizational system, and (c) CRM technology and U.S. retailer omnichannel strategy performance. A final sample of 55 participants, recruited from the sampling frame of 2,747, responded to an electronic survey adapted from Wang and Feng's CRM capabilities questionnaire and from an omnichannel maturity questionnaire created by RSR Research and Starmount. Spearman's rho and ordinal logistics regression were used to examine the relationships and the predictive value in testing the hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 results indicated five significant correlated pairs between (a) CRM technology and omnichannel strategy performance (rs = .781; p< .05), (b) customer-centric organizational system and omnichannel strategy performance (rs = .659; p < .05), (c) customer orientation and customer-centric organizational system (rs = .342; p < .05), (d) customer orientation and CRM technology (rs = .301; p < .05), and (e) customer-centric organizational system and CRM technology (rs = .624; p < .05). Hypothesis 2 findings indicated that CRM resources (customer orientation, customer-centric organizational system, and CRM technology) contributed to 75.6% of the variability of omnichannel strategy performance. Three recommendations for future research included (a) a quantitative correlational study to further explore additional CRM resource factors that explain to omnichannel strategy performance, (b) a proportional odds model of the current variables to determine an inferential model, and (c) a quantitative correlational study to test a rigorous sample of CRM resources and omnichannel strategy performance. |
