Determinants in the adoption of a customer relationship management system a study among bank managers

Abstract: Customer relationship management, better known as CRM, has become synonymous with business practices nowadays. Technology advancement has made it both possible and feasible for organizations to develop individual and intimate business relationships with their customers, irrespective of the size of their customer base or geographic dispersion. Unfortunately research has uncovered a significant number of cases in which CRM implementations simply failed to meet organizational expectations. Moreover, user resistance has been found to be a significant cause for this anomaly. This study aims to fill an existing gap in the literature by identifying a number of salient cognitive and behavioural constructs that, when grounded in a theoretical framework made up of the Technology Acceptance Model together with Equity Theory, can help us to gain a better understanding of the mechanics behind user resistance and identify ways to overcome it. A sequence of five separate yet interdependent studies has been conducted amongthe managers of a large bank. The studies focus on behavioural activation and inhibition, equity sensitivity, emotional labour as well as users’ perception of CRM systems’ usefulness, ease of use and firm performance. Findings suggest that a lot can be gained by recruiting the right employees and investing in them, in terms of training and empowerment, thereby creating teams of satisfied, highly competent service providers who would be willing to adopt and use their organization’s CRM system to enhance customer loyalty.