CRM in the Singapore logistics industry (CRM vendor perspective)

The logistics sector contributes significantly towards the GDP growth of Singapore. For the past 15 years, the Singapore government has invested heavily and made significant improvements to the transportation infrastructure. However, Singapore’s ranking fell in the Logistics Performance Index (LPI) by the World Bank in 2014. (The World Bank, 2014) Hence, good infrastructure is not enough for Singapore’s logistics industry to remain competitive and it is pertinent for Singapore to go beyond infrastructure in order to improve logistics service performance. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a tool that is widely adopted by many industries to manage customer relationship and improve service performance. This project adopts the perspective of CRM Software Vendors with supporting information from the 3PLs and Shippers to examine the reason for low adoption rate of CRM, understand the viability of CRM Adoption in the Singapore logistics industry and provide recommendations for the future. Existing literature and findings from a preliminary interview conducted with a 3PL were used to identify several salient points. This formed the basis of the CRM Vendor Interview questions. Through the interviews, we hope to understand more about the benefits, costs, motivators and barriers of CRM Adoption in Singapore’s logistics industry. Subsequently, we identified and analyzed the alignments and misalignments in perception of CRM from the three key stakeholders in order to have a more realistic understanding of the level of CRM awareness and understand how the factors led to the level of CRM Adoption. In summary, this project identified that the indicated awareness of CRM in Singapore logistics industry is high, but to varying degrees. Moreover, this high level of indicated awareness does not translate into a correspondingly high adoption. Thus, there is a potential for growth of CRM and we suggest some strategies for CRM Vendors to deepen the level of awareness of their clients and encourage adoption of CRM.Bachelor of Science (Maritime Studies