Business/IT-Alignment for Customer Relationship Management in the Telecommunication Industry: Framework and Case Study

Abstract

Customer relationship management (CRM) entails all aspects of interaction a company has with its customers, whether it is marketing, (pre-)sales or service related. In the last decade companies more and more recognized the importance of CRM, especially in dynamic industry sectors like telecommunications. However, companies did not always achieve the anticipated benefits of implementations of CRM strategies through, for example, information technology (IT-)deployment. In this paper we present a CRM framework for telcos which is based on the concepts of maturity and business/IT-alignment and which provides directions for a company's CRM strategy in order to obtain CRM performance benefits. The framework was applied to and validated at a Caribbean telco. The telco of study was in the phase of starting a CRM IT-deployment. The telco adopted the (from the framework) resulting CRM strategy by incorporating the identified gaps and suggestions in the project planning. More cases should further validate the soundness of the framework