Initiation Stage of a Mobile Customer Relationship Management

In recent years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become a topic of major importance. However, the mobile medium as an element of CRM is rarely taken into consideration. The aim of the present study is to integrate these two important areas by providing an understanding of how to utilize the mobile medium in CRM. The main purpose of this study is to build an empirically grounded framework of the initiation stage of Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mCRM) in retailing. The empirical part of the study employs a single-case study method. In detail, there is a major retailer involved that adopted mCRM and utilized the means of mobile marketing to activate customers to start a dialogue via mobile phone. The main results of the study indicate that while there are a lot of uncertainties related to adopting mCRM, the mobile medium may be an effective complement to traditional CRM. The paper finally presents contributions, limitations and avenues for further research. INTRODUCTION The goal of every company, at its most basic level, is to get and keep customers. Over the past decade it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate from competitors serving general product needs for customers. Therefore, companies have changed the focus to customer orientation and sought novel ways to provide value to customers. As a result, customer relationship management (CRM) has lately escalated into a topic of major importance among academics and practitioners (e.g. Zablah, Bellenger and Johnston, 2004). In this study, CRM is defined an ongoing process, which provides seamless integration of every area of business that touches the customer, for the purpose of building and maintaining a profitmaximizing portfolio of customer relationships. The objective of CRM is, on the one hand, to build and maintain customer relationships and to provide value for customers on the other. Despite the potential of traditional CRM to provide value for customers, customers are expecting more and more individual attention. New digital marketing channels such as the Internet and mobile phones are considered powerful channels to reach customers because they allow personalisation and interactivity of the content and the context of the message (Kim, Han & Schultz, 2004). While the Internet as a channel to manage customer relationships (eCRM) has attracted great attention, understanding how to effectively manage customer relationships through mobile medium has gained far less attention, and from marketing perspective we are dealing with an extremely unacknowledged phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to enhance knowledge about the utilization of mobile marketing in companies’ customer relationship management. In more detail, the focus of this study is the initiation stage of mCRM in retailing. To accomplish this, we next describe the theoretical background of the article and summarize the specific findings in previous studies on customer relationship management and mobile marketing communication that motivate our research. We then describe the data collection method and the results of the empirical analysis. The article concludes by discussing the implications of the results for both theory and practice, outlining the main limitations of the work and identifying avenues for further research in this emerging field. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION The key theoretical basis for CRM comes from the relationship marketing literature (e.g. Reinartz, Krafft and Hoyer, 2004). CRM is a holistic approach aiming at building and maintaining a profit-maximizing portfolio of customer relationships. Basically, CRM enables a company to become familiar with its customers by integrating hardware, software and applications aiming at understanding customers. Acquiring a better understanding of customers allows companies to interact, respond, and communicate more effectively with customers. In other words, customer databases and other technology applications such as the mobile marketing server enable companies to provide more satisfying and consistent relationship with customers, regardless of the channel the customer chooses to interact with. However, an effective implementation of CRM requires information from all relevant departments for the purpose of using customer information intelligently to create relationships