Francis Buttle

Recent reports implicate organizational culture in the failure of customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. This paper presents new empirical data on the association between organizational culture, as measured by the Competing Values model, and CRM outcomes. The research also investigates whether several additional variables moderate those outcomes: the ease of using the CRM system, the compatibility of the CRM system with existing systems, competitive intensity, and turbulence in the organization's served markets. The results show that organizational culture has a significant association with the achievement of good CRM outcomes. Most notable is the strong connection of adhocracy and market cultures to CRM success. The data also reveal that only one of the moderator variables, market turbulence, affects the strength of the relationship between organizational culture and CRM outcomes.

Linking aspects of relationships with some measure of competitive advantage has become a growing topic of interest for marketing and strategy scholars. Studies in this area have focussed on trust, commitment, mutual goals, power, social bonding, transaction costs, information exchange, idiosyncratic investment and governance, each of which have been shown to influence the incidence of relationship-based competitive advantage (Morgan and Hunt, 1999). However, only two authors have attempted to conceptualise relationship-based competitive advantage in a holistic sense (Jap, 1999, 2001; Wilson, 1995). Using the IMP school of relationship marketing and an alternative conceptualisation of competitive advantage, this paper proposes an alternative model of relationship-based competitive advantage.

Word-of-mouth marketing agencies typically report campaign results in terms of the numbers of people receiving the brand message from campaign participants. These reports say nothing about the types of conversation in which the WOMM message is embedded. Using a custom-developed Facebook app and Social Network Analysis we reveal that half of offline campaign-related conversations are deliberately initiated by the campaign participant and half emerge in everyday conversation. Implications for agencies and clients are explored.

The network approach to studying business-to-business interaction acknowledges that the acts of one relational party can produce effects not only in the dyadic partner but also amongst third parties within the network. Because acts are subject to meaningful interpretation by other parties, the effects are not always as the actor expects or desires. We use a single case study to explore this phenomenon. The focal company of our research decided to introduce a detailed contract called the Dealer Agreement. The Dealer Agreement was intended and expected to govern commercial exchange with their dealer network, to ensure positive effects on the dealer's competitiveness and therefore success in the dealers' served markets. Our informants in the focal company held the view that " if everything is written down, people perform better. " The evidence we collected from the dealer network shows that this single act-introducing a document to norm and control commercial exchange with dealers – resulted in a number of outcomes, positive and negative, expected and unexpected, and in one case jeopardized the continuity of a well-established and highly valued relationship. We find that these varied outcomes are a consequence of the contexts brought to bear on the dealers' interpretations of the act of introducing the agreement. One dealer who responded positively had just begun in the role of dealer for our focal company, and used the newness of their relationship to contextualize the meaning of the agreement. For this party, the Dealer Agreement provided mutually understood grounds for business interaction, and was deemed as a demonstration of the focal company's commitment to the relationship. Another group of dealers reacted negatively to the introduction of the agreement. They evaluated its introduction in the context of their well-established, long term relationships with the focal company. These informants regarded the Agreement as a betrayal of the trust they had created and maintained over many years of doing business together. These different, meaning-filled interpretations of the focal company's act have clear consequences in the behaviors of the dyadic partner and the business network. Our research shows the importance of understanding contexts of interpretation.

The perception of value is central to the satisfaction and loyalty of customers, and is therefore of great importance to organisations. Recent focus on the customer experience has led to the recognition that value, in its broadest sense, can be thought of as something experienced by customers rather than packaged and sold by companies. Customer perception of value over the entire course of the customer experience, or " value-inexperience " , is a relatively new concept that has received little research to date. This paper presents a theoretical foundation and proposed research agenda for this concept.

After a period of decline at the turn of the century, demand for CRM software appears to be rebounding in the Australian marketplace. However, a large proportion of companies are still undeveloped in terms of their application of software to support customer management. Our research shows that less than 40% of companies use CRM software to support their customer management strategies. When it is used, software more commonly supports customer retention and development than customer acquisition, especially among service-oriented industries. However, when applied to customer acquisition
activities our research indicates that it results in more cost-effective marketing. Companies that do employ software are generally satisfied with its return on investment, with the exception of larger companies. The performance of the software in meeting companies’ expectations of customer retention is a statistically significant predictor of profitability. We conclude that the intelligent adoption and deployment of CRM software can yield improvements in profitability.

Customer management software is an important component of both analytical and operational CRM implementations. Demand for CRM software appears to be rebounding in the Australian marketplace, after a period of decline at the turn of the century. Our research shows that a large proportion of Australian companies are undeveloped in terms of their application of software to support customer management. Less than 40% of companies use CRM software to support their customer management strategies. When it is used, software more commonly supports customer retention and development than customer acquisition. Companies that do employ software are generally satisfied with its return on investment. The performance of the software in meeting companies' expectations of customer retention is a statistically significant predictor of profitability. We conclude that the intelligent adoption and deployment of CRM software can yield improvements in profitability.

Recent reports implicate organizational culture in the failure of customer relationship management (CRM) system implementations. This paper presents new empirical data on the association between organizational culture, as measured by the competing values model, and CRM outcomes. The research also investigates whether several additional variables moderate those outcomes: the ease of using the CRM system, the compatibility of the CRM system with existing systems, competitive intensity, and turbulence in the organization's served markets. The results show that organizational culture has a significant association with the achievement of good CRM outcomes. Most notable is the strong connection of adhocracy and market cultures to CRM success. The data also reveal that only one of the moderator variables, market turbulence, affects the strength of the relationship between organizational culture and CRM outcomes.

The value of relationships has been enormous because it has made the pain more bearable " claimed the manager of one large company that participated in our research. Building and maintaining relationships in business-to-business (B2B) contexts involves sacrifices by the parties involved, whether in time or money or by precluding the development of relationships with other parties. Relationships also deliver benefits which may or may not surpass these costs. The net value of a relationship can be thought of as the difference or ratio between these costs and benefits. We have conducted extensive case-based research into B2B relationships and found that relationships deliver value in forms that go beyond simple financial considerations. We find that B2B relationships deliver value in four different forms, each of which can be indicated in a number of ways: 1) Personal value, indicated in customer retention and referral; 2) Financial value, expressed through increases in efficiency, share of business/wallet, share of market, and received price; 3) Knowledge value, expressed through market intelligence, idea generation and innovation; and 4) Strategic value, experienced through gains in long term planning and access to extended networks. Personal value is connected to another relational outcome-non-economic satisfaction. We observed that when personal value is found in a relationship the parties are more willing to stay, as well as more willing to recommend their business partner to others. Relationships may also permit sellers to achieve higher prices or either/both parties to reduce their costs of dealing with the other. We call this type of value 'Financial Value' which is linked to economic satisfaction with the relationship. Relationships allow communication to flow between parties. That is, parties share information, which might include market intelligence, feedback on their performance, methods to improve processes or new ways to manage their business. The parties also are more likely to work together in 'idea generation' teams. Put another way, the parties learn from one another, which we regard as 'Knowledge Value.' We also found that companies that maintain relationships experience longer time horizons for planning, as well as access to extended networks from which they can benefit. This provides the parties with a competitive edge that that we have called 'Strategic Value'.

Whilst customer experience is recognised in recent decades as an important adjunct to the long-standing information processing view of consumers, there is relatively little empirical research into customer experience to support the theories and models that have been developed. Anticipated consumption, or pre-purchase experience, is the important first stage in a number of multi-stage theoretical models of experience. This research aims to provide an empirically-founded understanding of the key elements that comprise anticipated consumption. Qualitative methods are used, in particular ethnographic content analysis, to study first-person narratives of a range of customer experiences across eight different consumer sectors.

Although the importance of business relationships has been widely recognised, both in the academic and practitioner literatures, there is still room to improve our understanding of the dynamics of interaction between companies. The application of ‘Rules Theory’ to the field brings a new perspective that helps to advance understanding of the interactions between organizations. ‘Rules Theory’ regards a business relationship as a social construction resulting from the interaction of two or more companies over time. Interactions between organizations are enacted within episodes, and a number of episodes constitute a relationship. The actions of each party to a relationship are interpreted by the other party, and a response enacted. Interpretation is context-bound, and these contexts are themselves social constructions. ‘Rules Theory’ identifies two forms of rule that enable analysts to explain the meaning of an action (constitutive rule), and subsequent action (regulative rule).

We review the published research into Sales Force Automation (SFA) in order to identify gaps in our knowledge that might be worthy of further investigation. We find that academics have tried to answer just 4 questions: Why do organizations adopt SFA? What are the organizational impacts of SFA? What accounts for the success or failure of SFA projects? What accounts for variance in salesperson adoption of SFA?

This research  demonstrates the appropriateness of repertory grid technique to destination image research. In this particular application, the grid, developed by George A. Kelly, was used to investigate the images held by English vacationers of Austria as a summer destination. The gris was used to find out how vacationers construed destination countries and to discover how they perceived Austria in terms of the constructs generated. Austria was placed in its competitive context by comparing its image with that of Switzerland, which the Austrian National Tourist Office cites as a major competitor.

Benchmarking data provided by 144 organisations across four
industry sectors are consolidated and mined to generate insights into the relationship between complaints-handling processes, as defined in ISO 10002, the International Standard for Complaints Handling, and a number of marketing-related outcomes. Factor analysis of the 17 complaints-handling
process variables yields five factors accounting for 62.6% of the overall variance. The most important factors are: visibility and accessibility of the complaints-handling policy and process; easy-to-use process for all complainants; and responsiveness of the complaints-handling process. Collectively these factors account for 24% of the variance in the desired marketing-related outcomes, most notably levels of customer advocacy and customer satisfaction. Although there have been a number of empirical investigations of International Standards, this is the first empirical study to investigate the influence of ISO 10002-conformant complaints-handling processes on marketing-related and broader outcomes. We conclude that
complaints-handling processes that conform to ISO 10002 can yield significant marketing-related benefits, and we make recommendations for marketing practitioners.

... Page 6. 6 References Abdi, Herve (2004). Partial least square regression (PLS regression). ... Cameron, Kim S. and Quinn, Robert E. (1999), Diagnosing and changing organizational culture. First ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Campbell, Alexandra J. (2003). ...

We review the published research into Sales Force Automation (SFA) in order to identify gaps in our knowledge that might be worthy of further investigation. We find that academics have tried to answer just 4 questions: Why do organizations adopt SFA? What are the organizational impacts of SFA? What accounts for the success or failure of SFA projects? What accounts

Our paper reviews the literature on customer development and reports findings from an exploratory survey of practices in Australian companies. We find that companies that build customer development plans around increases in revenues, rather than reductions in cost-to-serve achieve better development outcomes. Superior performance at customer development seems to be strongly associated with managing the revenue side of the profit equation. We conclude with recommendations for further research.

We review the published research into Sales Force Automation (SFA) in order to identify gaps in our knowledge that might be worthy of further investigation. We find that academics have tried to answer just 4 questions: Why do organizations adopt SFA? What are the organizational impacts of SFA? What accounts for the success or failure of SFA projects? What accounts

ABSTRACT Our survey of CRM competencies in 170 Australian companies focused on 4 main areas: customer knowledge, customer acquisition, customer retention, and customer development. We find that current practice is rather elementary. Companies are failing to perform the basic tasks of generating customer knowledge, customer acquisition, customer retention and customer development with a high level of competence. We find that there is considerable potential for improvement. Understanding CRM Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term that has yet to achieve uncontested status and meaning, unlike some other management terms (Buttle 2002). Hardware vendors, software vendors, consultants, and managers responsible for implementing CRM strategies are likely to have different viewpoints. There are at least three different perspectives on CRM - strategic, operational and analytical - though these have been consolidated into a single definition below (Buttle 2003, p. 31): CRM is the core business strategy that integrates internal processes and functions, and external networks, to create and deliver value to targeted customers at a profit. It is grounded on high quality customer data and enabled by information technology. Implicit in this definition are a number of CRM competencies. A CRM competency is some proficiency that is necessary for the successful implementation of a CRM strategy. Among these CRM competencies are the following. Competency at:

Relationship quality has begun to attract interest as a research topic over the past few years. Within this paper, two research questions are explored: “what are the key characteristics of relationship quality ” and “Is the actor bonds (B), resource ties (R) and activity links (A) triptych advocated by the IMP group an adequate framework for encompassing relationship quality”. Results from interviews within the media and advertising industry allow better insight into items characterising relationship quality, providing a list of 250 items, some of which relate to characteristics previously identified within the literature and some of which do not. Subsequent coding and classification of these items reveals that the IMP’s BRA framework, previously applied to relationship substance, can be successfully applied in providing a classification for relationship quality items as well. Though a qualitative approach was adopted at this stage, it does provide more insight into the nature of th...

We explore the relationship between customer-generated word-of-mouth and corporate reputation. After a concise literature review, we present several insights from a multiple case study of 3 organizations. Our main finding is that customer dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) are thought to have strong downside consequences for corporate reputation. Positive WOM does not appear to have equivalent upside significance for corporate reputation. NWOM often occurs as customers express dissatisfaction because of substandard customer service. However, it is when these issues or other negatively connoted stories find their way into the public domain that reputation suffers. Fear of reputational damage causes great anxiety to the organisations' senior management. Reputations are shown to be fragile. Damage limitation strategies are implemented in all three organisations.

The importance of business relationships has been widely recognised, both in academic and practitioner literature. The effects of exchanged acts between parties have not been sufficiently explained though. The application of 'Rules Theory' to the field brings a new perspective that helps to advance understanding the dynamic interaction between organizations, which build relationships and improve business effectiveness. 'Rules Theory' regards a business relationship as a social construction resulting from the interaction of two or more companies over time. The act of one party is interpreted by the other and a response enacted. Interpretation is context-bound, and these contexts are themselves social constructions. We describe in this paper how rules theory provides an appropriate technology for understanding intercompany interaction, as if the parties apply sets of rules that give meaning and guide action. Keywords: business-to-business relationships, relationshi...

This paper explores the relationship between customer-generated word-of-mouth and corporate reputation. After a concise literature review, we present several insights from a multiple case study of 3 organizations. Our main finding is that customer dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) are thought to have strong downside consequences for corporate reputation. Positive WOM does not appear to have equivalent upside significance for corporate reputation. NWOM often occurs as customers express dissatisfaction because of substandard customer service. However, it is when these issues or other negatively connoted stories find their way into the public domain that reputation suffers. Fear of reputational damage causes great anxiety to the organisations' senior management. Reputations are shown to be fragile. Damage limitation strategies are implemented in all three organisations.

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We discuss an issue critical to companies that invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM): how to assess return on investment (ROI). A number of issues make this task challenging. First, defining the boundaries of CRM; second, establishing what constitutes a CRM investment; third, deciding what counts as a ‘return ’ on that investment; and, finally, choosing the time frame to use in the assessment. We first review the literature on the effectiveness of CRM, and then propose a customer-journey approach to computing ROI on CRM. This approach traces the customer’s value from initial acquisition, through development to retention. We then propose a series of research propositions that can help inform how business performance can be affected while implementing CRM.

We report the findings of a major research project that reveals several forms of attachment that consumers develop with service organisations. We draw on a number of literatures including those of the fields of consumer involvement and organisational commitment. Our primary research programme analysed data from 7 focus groups, 39 one-on-one interviews and 975 individual consumer questionnaires. We developed and refined an instrument that ultimately identified 3 forms of positive attachment, based on three different foundations: the credibility of the organisation, compatibility between the values of the organisation and those of the consumer, and interpersonal or relational considerations. We have developed a statistically valid and reliable scale that we dub COPAT (Customer-Organisation Positive Attachment) that can be used to measure these 3 forms of attachment. We also identify other forms of consumer attachment grounded on less positive associations with organisations, including...

Customer retention has been a hot topic since the mid-1990s, but little research has been conducted into the management competencies that are associated with outstanding customer retention performance. We address that shortcoming. Our research investigates the associations between excellent customer retention and a number of management structures and processes, including customer retention planning, budgeting, and accountability, insight into customer reasons for defection, the search for advance indicators of customer switching intention and the presence of a documented complaints handling process. We find that excellence at customer retention is positively and significantly associated with the presence of a documented complaints-handling process and confidence that the company understands the reasons that customers switch.

The ideal person to write a review of books is definitely someone who has written a textbook himself. Bowie and Buttle indeed have made a promising effort to disseminate an important perspective on a subject related to hospitality. One might be quick to conclude that this text is just a dime a dozen and a window dressing of the first edition since not much space is dedicated to reflect on marketing theory and practice to the level of the state of the art. But this sort of unfair review is best left to those scholars who had experienced writing a textbook which is celebrated throughout the English speaking world, like Kotler or Drucker. The review here is a modest attempt to guide those who seek some idea and facts about the book before purchasing it.  

Relationship quality has begun to attract interest as a research topic over the past few years. Within this paper, two research questions are explored: “what are the key characteristics of relationship quality” and “Is the actor bonds (B), resource ties (R) and activity links (A) triptych advocated by the IMP group an adequate framework for encompassing relationship quality”. Results from interviews within the media and advertising industry allow better insight into items characterising relationship quality, providing a list of 250 items, some of which relate to characteristics previously identified within the literature and some of which do not. Subsequent coding and classification of these items reveals that the IMP’s BRA framework, previously applied to relationship substance, can be successfully applied in providing a classification for relationship quality items as well. Though a qualitative approach was adopted at this stage, it does provide more insight into the nature of the...

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) means different things to different people. For some, CRM is the term used to describe a set of IT applications that automate customer-facing processes in marketing, selling and service. For others, it is about an organizational desire to be more customer focused. Others associate CRM with the capture, analysis and exploitation of customer-related data. One distinction

We investigate how word-of-mouth marketing campaign participants select communication partners, content and channel. Rules Theory, which we adopt from the interpersonal communication literature, indicates that socially constructed contextual rules explain participants’ choices. Our analysis suggests that campaign participants are sensitive to the socially constructed contexts within which interaction takes place and adjust their communication choices accordingly. We identify four contexts that account for variance in participants’ choices: episode, relationship, life-script and family narrative. We show that specific communication choices may be obligated, legitimated or prohibited dependent on the activated context.

... et al., 1977; Hirschman et a!., 19781; structured personal interviews [Singson, 1975; James, 1976; Rich and Portis, 19641; unstructured personal interviews [Kunkel and Berry, 1968; Jain and Etgar ... The sample was randomly chosen from the female names on the elec-toral rolls. ...

The Co-ordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) is a social constructionist theory of human action which provides insight into the structure and process of multi-person decision making. In the CMM analysis presented here, the Hughes family′s vacation decision making supplies an episode within which the family′s socially constructed resources are expressed and recreated. CMM is a technology offering considerable promise to