The Role of Corporate Sustainability and Digitalization in Customer Relationship Management

In recent years, companies have been confronted with stagnating markets, an increasing competitive pressure, dwindling resources, new technological developments, and steadily growing customer expectations. In order to meet the challenges and benefit from possibilities that arise with these trends of our ever-changing environment, companies need to take care of several aspects. First, the rise of ethical consumerism along with dwindling resources force companies to increasingly integrate sustainability issues in their business strategy, processes and products. Second, digitalization enables and demands the use of new ways of business interactions to manage customer relationships. The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to contribute to the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with a particular focus on business transformation towards sustainability and the challenges of a digitalized world for the management of customer relationships. The first three research papers thereby focus on different aspects of business transformation towards sustainability. Research paper 1 focuses on the interface of customers and the underlying business model, investigating the relationship of customer communication about sustainability and respective investment decisions. Research paper 2 focuses on the business model and its underlying business processes, analyzing how companies can transform towards sustainability and how this can happen in line with economic principles. Research paper 3 concentrates on the transformation itself, deriving key requirements for a successful project management, respective key performance indicators, and suitable tool support for steering transformation projects towards sustainability. Research Papers 4 and 5 deal with the aspects of a sustainable CRM in a digitalized world, focusing on the new possibilities for managing customer relations that arise with digitalization. Thereby, research paper 4 focuses on the demands and preferences of customers in a digitalized world, finding that channel preferences vary with the respective context or complexity of a service. Research paper 5 focuses on the management of customers in the online social network channel and especially on the identification of the most influential users. Finally, the key findings are summarized and starting points for future research are highlighted