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Change management
Customer relationship management (CRM) is featuring in more and more business strategies as a catalyst for change. Aimed at improving relationships with the end user, CRM projects tend to involve sales, marketing and technology teams and come with the expectation that internal processes will change. But though the numbers of executives interested in such projects has rocketed since the 1990s, the number of them who manage CRM implementation effectively is considerably less. For while every effort to predict strategic and procedural change is made, the effect of CRM on the individual member of staff is frequently overlooked. This is often a fatal oversight.
Analysing the relative success of recent CRM projects at three major banks in New Zealand, Philip Shum of William Paterson University, Liliana Bove of the University of Melbourne and Seigyoung Auh of the Yonsei School of Business argue that effective CRM implementation must involve good change management. People are at the centre of any change process, so the attitude of employees towards any new policy is very important. Despite this, the people-related issues associated with organizational change are under-researched, though these writers offer some preliminary investigation of the relationship between employee commitment and successful CRM.
The researchers chose to look at banks because of their reliance on the use of technology, which makes them good candidates for CRM-related change. The three particular banks were chosen because they give a good impression...