Usability of CRM Systems as Collaboration Infrastructures in Business Networks

Collaboration among companies is a major development in business and electronic business concepts. While groupware, teleconferencing or e-mail-systems are widespread and crossfunctional in nature, support for collaboration in business processes has mainly been studied in the engineering and supply chain area. Virtual organizations and networked business also require collaboration in customer-oriented processes such as the management of offer generation, campaigns, customer data or complaints. While the concept of collaborative customer relationship management (CRM) has been discussed by several authors already, the technological scenarios available to implement these processes are still open for research. This paper investigates the role of CRM systems as application architectures for collaborative CRM. The findings show that CRM systems provide only basic functionalities for inter-organizational collaboration and seem currently not able to support collaborative CRM without help of additional supporting tools or extensive customizing of system functionalities.