Developing an Integrated Model to Support Effective Customer Relationships Management Implementation within the Private Sector of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

A successful Customer Relationships Management (CRM) implementation helps organisations to obtain competitive advantages over others by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, increasing revenue and reducing operating costs. Effective CRM implementation has become more and more important owing to the huge percentage of failures that occur. This year, organisations are expected to spend about $13billion on implementing CRM. While a significant amount of research has been conducted into CRM implementations, particularly with respect to Critical Success Factors (CSFs), only a minority of the implementations have been successful. Culture plays a major role in CRM implementation. It is ranked one of the top three factors involved in CRM’s CSFs. Culture, therefore, become significant issues when planning to implement CRM within the developing countries, such as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) due to its existing cultural differences. Very limited research into CSFs for CRM implementation in the KSA exists. This research, therefore, focuses on identifying the CSFs and their interrelationships for CRM implementation in the KSA with the ultimate aim of developing an integrated model that includes these factors and their interrelationships to support effective implementation of CRM solutions within the private sector of the KSA from both organisations’ and customers’ perspectives. It adopts an integrated mix of case study and Grounded Theory as a research strategy. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and documentation, which was then analysed using Grounded Theory data analysis. The findings showed that adoption of CRM in the KSA revealed some additional CSFs to those found within other studies, such as customer culture and the country’s policies and procedures. The interrelationships between the CSFs of CRM were identified and shown to be vital for successful CRM implementation. The results identified the relationships between CRM’s CSFs and their key development stages. The findings were interpreted by using Institutional Theory. It was found that implementing a CRM solution as a response to institutional isomorphism pressures could lead to a conflict and mismatch of institutional logics among customers and CRM solutions. Organisations subjected to these pressures implemented CRM without the advantage of a cost-benefit analysis. This increased the failure of CRM adoption. This research makes six major contributions. Firstly, a theoretical contribution was made by applying Institutional Theory to enrich the understanding and interpretation of the research’s findings. This provided useful insight into the main factors that affect the adoption of CRM and extended the line of research on the use of this theory to study Information Systems (IS) in organisations. Secondly, the development of the research model presented the CSFs that affected the adoption of CRM solutions and their interrelationships from both the organisations and customers' perspectives within KSA. Thirdly, the research identified thirty-one cause-and-effect relationships between CSFs that need to occur in a dependency mode for the success of CRM implementation. Fourthly, it identified that each CSF needs to be executed in certain stages during the CRM’s development life cycle. Fifthly, this research provides organisations within the private sector in the KSA (those that intend to implement CRM solutions) with an extensive way of thinking about its CRM implementation. Finally, this research is one part of the very limited research focusing on the implementation of CRM solutions within the private sector in the KSA.Saudi Cultural Burea