Article Review: Customer Relationship Management
Cooper, Upton, and Seaman (2005) conducted a comparative analysis of family and non-family business practices centered on customer relationship management. The purpose of the study was to gain insight into how family-owned businesses employ customer relationship management (CRM) practices and strategies to improve relationships with their clients, encourage customer loyalty, and grow their businesses. The researchers theorized that family-owned businesses (which are generally smaller than publicly held companies or chains) are in a unique position to leverage relationship building into a sustainable competitive advantage. Nevertheless, as Cooper, et al (2005) commented, there is relatively little research on how family businesses actually implement CRM.
The business problem specifically addressed by Cooper, et al (2005) is the question of whether or not smaller family-owned businesses are using CRM to create a customer-centric orientation that gains competitive advantage for the business. Family businesses are seen by Cooper, et al (2005) as able in many instances to provide quick customer response. Similarly, family businesses may be able to make decisions more rapidly than non-family businesses that contain multiple levels of management. However, Cooper, et al (2005) found in their study that family businesses tend to show less interest in CRM and to rank it as less important for success than non-family businesses.
This finding, stated Cooper, et al (2005), emerged from a survey of 82 family firms and 370 non-family owned firms. The research hypotheses addressed by Cooper, et al (2005) suggested first that family business executives are as likely as non-family business executives to rate the importance of CRM as high and secondly, less likely to assess their knowledge of CRM as high. Using a national database of executives, the researchers constructed a survey empl...