Understanding Organization-CRM System Misfits and their Evolution: A Path to Improving Usage

Since the late 1990s, organizations have been increasingly investing in customer relationship management (CRM) systems to support their sales, marketing and customer service operations. Despite the significant growth in the acquisition of CRM systems and the widely accepted concepts of CRM strategy, academics and practitioners repeatedly point to the high failure rates of CRM initiatives. Improving CRM systems’ use could provide organizations with considerable benefits. Limited research has aimed at understanding post-adoption CRM systems usage behavior, however. This is an important and topical subject at a time when CRM has edged past enterprise resource planning (ERP) as the top application software investment priority and is expected to drive enterprise system (ES) spending in 2013 and 2014. Using a multiple case study design methodology and grounded theory (GT) as the data collection and analysis technique, this five-year process study strives to accomplish four primary research objectives. Firstly, ...