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Critical Success Factors in Customer Relationship Management Implementation for Emerging-Market Marketing Organizations: A Review

Rita Korkor Agyei1, Ogochukwu T. Izuchukwu2, Dominic Feboh3

Abstract

Customer relationship management has become a central capability for marketing organizations, yet its implementation fails at rates that have persisted despite two decades of research and practice, and the failures are concentrated not in the technology but in the strategic, organizational, and process conditions surrounding it. This review examines the critical success factors that determine whether CRM implementation succeeds, with particular attention to marketing organizations in emerging markets, where the general success factors operate under conditions—of data maturity, infrastructure, skills, and channel structure—that differ from those of the mature markets in which most CRM research was conducted. Drawing together the relationship-marketing tradition from which CRM emerged, the strategic and process conceptualizations of CRM, the empirical literature on CRM performance, and the information-systems literature on implementation success, the review organizes the critical success factors around seven themes: strategic alignment and a customer-centric vision rather than a technology-first orientation; top-management support and change leadership; the management of people and organizational change; process redesign and cross-functional integration; data quality and information management; technology fit and system quality; and performance measurement. The review then examines how these factors operate in the emerging- market context, arguing that the factors themselves are largely invariant but that their difficulty and their relative weight shift—data quality and skills become more binding, infrastructure and channel structure impose additional constraints, and the temptation to treat CRM as a technology purchase is heightened where the strategic and organizational prerequisites are least developed. Two findings recur: that the dominant cause of CRM failure across contexts is the treatment of CRM as a technology initiative rather than a customer strategy, and that the emerging-market context amplifies rather than alters this failure mode, because it raises the difficulty of precisely the strategic and organizational factors that the technology-first approach neglects. The review draws implications for marketing organizations and identifies a research agenda for CRM in emerging markets. www.iiardpub.org

Keywords

customer relationship managementCRM implementationcritical success factorsrelationship marketingcustomer-centricityemerging marketsmarketing organizationsinformation systems successcha

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