Mobile customer relationship management: foundations, challenges and solutions
About the Guest Editor
Ragnar Schierholz works as a researcher at the Institute of Information Management of the University of St Gallen, Switzerland. He is a member of the Competence Center Customer Management (CCCM), in which large European companies do joint research on customer relationship management (CRM) and knowledge management. His research focus is on the application of mobile business technology in the field of CRM. Prior to his work in St Gallen, he has worked as an IT consultant for IBM Germany, Lotus Professional Services Germany and as an IT Service Engineer for ONEstone GmbH Germany. He earned degrees as Master of Science in Computer Science from the Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA and as Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatiker (equivalent to a Master of Science in Information Systems) from the University of Paderborn, Germany.
Mobile customer relationship management: foundations, challenges and solutions
Technological advancements in mobile communications enable new ways of doing business, often referred to as “mobile business”. Mobile business is typically defined as the application of mobile technologies to improve or extend business processes and open new market segments. However, even though strongly influenced by technology, mobile business is not limited to technological aspects, but requires appropriate management concepts as well.
The research field dealing with the interaction of businesses with their customers and the related back-end processes within the businesses, such as marketing, sales and service processes, has often been referred to as CRM. In its beginning, CRM has also been mostly technology driven, but today it is mostly considered as technology-based management approach.
This special issue deals with the application of mobile business concepts and technologies in the domain of CRM. This is what we define as mobile customer relationship management (mCRM). It involves mobile business support for internal CRM processes such as marketing campaign management, mobile sales force, mobile sales channels or mobile customer service interaction. Examples of mCRM include mobile marketing campaigns, mobile sales reporting, mobile ticketing, and product-related mobile information services. The goal of the special issue is to give insights into fundamentals of mCRM, identify current challenges of mCRM, to propose solutions to current problems and challenges in mCRM and to demonstrate successful examples of mCRM. To reach this goal, we have acquired seven excellent papers which cover mCRM from various perspectives.
In the first paper, Valsecchi, Renga and Rangone identify typical mCRM applications in the Italian market by an exploratory analysis. In order to gain a better understanding of mCRM and the associated benefits, they analyze seven cases from both public as well as private organizations in further detail. In the second paper, Sinisalo, Salo, Karjaluoto and Leppäniemi derive a conceptualization of mCRM and develop a framework of underlying issues and challenges in mCRM. They conducted an in-depth case study with a large Finnish retailer and identify critical issues both on a conceptual and a technological level. In the third paper, Laukkanen explores customer value perceptions of mCRM by comparing internet banking with mobile banking. He conducted a qualitative study with in-depth interviews with users of internet banking and mobile banking and identifies differing value perceptions that customers expect when dealing with these two channels of banking services. By understanding these value perceptions, service providers gain a better understanding of the differentiation of mobile services against their online and traditional counterparts. The fourth paper by Lee and Jun performs a quantitative analysis in order to understand customers' repurchase intention in mobile commerce channels by applying concepts from the technology acceptance model, customer satisfaction and contextual perceived value. They propose a model combining these concepts to explain customer repurchase intention in the mobile commerce context. The fifth paper by Bamba and Barnes focuses on SMS-based advertising as a specific application in mCRM and investigates consumer acceptance issues with SMS advertising. Obtaining permission from the consumer before contacting her with advertising communications is a legal requirement in many countries nowadays to avoid spam. Based on a multi-method approach including qualitative and quantitative elements, Bamba and Barnes develop a model explaining consumers' willingness to give such permission. In the sixth paper, Schierholz,Kolbe and Brenner develop a method for the introduction of mCRM in organizations covering strategic management, process management and technological issues. The method helps business managers to avoid typical pitfalls in the introduction of mCRM into their organization. Finally, in the seventh paper, Rossi, Tuunainen and Pesonen conduct an in-depth case study and explain a successful example of a mobile field force application in a tobacco reseller from the Baltic region. The case study demonstrates how mCRM concepts can be applied to improve the performance of CRM business processes and identify what it takes to implement mCRM successfully. We also include an additional paper by Al-Mudimigh which investigates the role and impact of business process management (BPM) in successful Enterprise System (ES) software package implementation.
All papers though taking a different perspective to mCRM – from conceptualization and benefit analysis, via technology acceptance of users and introduction method to valuable case studies of application in selected industries – share the same vision that mobile technologies will change the way customer relationships are managed in the future. This special issue also shows that this mobile future is already economically feasible today and here to stay. The editors strongly endorse this perception.
The guest editors wish to thank the executive editor for giving us the opportunity to compile this issue as well as the numerous reviewers that made this quality set of papers possible. Finally, since some of the papers were initially accepted to HICCS-39 we also thank the organizers of the annual electronic CRM mini-track of “diverting” the best mCRM papers to this issue.
Ragnar SchierholzGuest Editor
