Information requirements for Customer Relationship Management: A case study in a New Zealand Bank

Customer Relationship Management is gaining importance as a business strategy. It seeks to select, cultivate and manage the most profitable customer relationships with a view to increasing long-term profitability, through understanding customers' needs. This requires organisations to understand the information requirements of CRM implementation. Most published work to date focuses on management information requirements. Little published research has examined front-end sales agents' information needs and yet they are arguably the most important group of users, with direct interaction with customers. This paper seeks to close the knowledge gap by surveying a group of branch and call centre sales agents within a bank to identify their information needs.