How to assess organizational and strategic impacts of customer relationship management: A multi-perspective performance evaluation method

Despite the awareness of academics and managers of the impact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can have on firm's performance, contributions on methods to measure CRM performance, other than economic and financial ones, are neither well developed nor well communicated. Academics and practitioners call for new empirical models and performance metrics to testify and measure the overall contribution of a CRM project to firm performance, as traditional methods of evaluating the return on investment do not capture the multifunctional and complex nature of CRM. Thus, this study aims to develop a CRM performance evaluation method that helps companies to evaluate the organizational and strategic impacts of CRM. To this end, first, based on an in-depth review of the literature and experts’ opinions, we develop an original method that overcomes the prevalent shortcomings of previous studies. Second, we validate its accuracy and meaningfulness. Third, we test its feasibility and utility within a sample of companies. The proposed method is based on multiple perspectives and conditional factors and includes objective and perceptual measures, accounting for the opinion of key informants and CRM users. The method monitors the organizational and strategic performance of CRM over time, thus allowing for a clearer decision-making process and an orientation towards the future.