Digital Business: CRM, New Technologies & Management Practices

This report explores the significance of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the context of digital business and the impact of new technologies on management practices. It traces the evolution of CRM from its early stages to its integration with modern technologies like cloud computing, IoT, Big Data, and Machine Learning, highlighting its role in streamlining processes, increasing sales, and improving customer service. The report discusses how CRM can be implemented across various industries and its potential to enhance customer acquisition, retention, and employee productivity. It also relates CRM technology to course content, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities presented by technology and innovation management in a global business environment. Furthermore, the report touches upon emerging theories on business and management structure, such as contingency management theory and system management theory, to provide a comprehensive understanding of CRM's role in driving business growth and development. The report concludes that CRM is a vital management function and technology that integrates business processes and facilitates organizational growth in the digital age, emphasizing the importance of adopting CRM to foster better customer relationships and personalized offerings.

Running Head: MANAGEMENT 0
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Digital business and new technologies

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Customer Relationship Management
With the evolution of digital world, there is no doubt that technology is shaping the future in
terms of making significant impact on business firms and marketing. Moreover, there are
various sorts of technologies that are either being used by the companies or as customers and
it is not wrong to say that initially, most of the business firms are entirely relies upon its
labour force. With rise of technology, no businesses want to lag behind and attain to gain
competitive edge in their respective industry. Most of the large scale business firms have
already started implementing technology in their management structures and practices as they
believe that technology and innovation are key drivers of competitive advantage in today’s
knowledge economy.
In references to the topics from the lecturer side, the topic that is selected as customer
relationship management (CRM) and Athanasoulias and Chountalas (2017) defined CRM as
a system that improves a business capability to nurture and cultivate customer relationships
by offering a unified approach in managing customer associated information while also
streamlining various processes. This topic deemed to be important as it is related with the one
of the most important stakeholders of the company i.e. customers and all the business or
corporate activities are directed towards the successful satisfaction of customers only and at
this core, CRM is all concern of such activities, technologies and strategies that businesses
used to manage their interactions with their existing and potential customers. In simple
words, CRM helps companies in developing a relationship with their customers that in turn,
creates loyalty and customer retention resulting in increased profit for the business in the long
period of time.
In relation with development and evolution of customer relationship management, it was
started back in the 1950s, as the business grew, memory gave away to pen, paper and pad for
gathering and storing relevant customer information. Following to this, database marketing
became a trend in the 1980s, which allows organisations to use of statistics to collect and
analyse the data so as to develop customized communication for retaining and attracting
customers (Giannakis-Bompolis and Boutsouki, 2014). Furthermore, CRM gained credibility
and boom in software development marketing in the early 90s with introduction of sales force
automation for organisation. CRM products also began to comprise different functions of
organisations such as marketing, shipping and enterprise resource planning and together with

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it, online CRM became a reality. With passage of time, there is an integration of CRM with
business intelligence services and communication technologies and services. CRM is now
expected to reach more than $80 billion in revenues by 2025 (talisma.com, 2018) and the
future of this technology holds a lot of promises as cloud, IoT, Big Data and Machine
learning driving the growth story of various enterprises.
According to Soltani and Navimipour (2016), customer relationship management is also a
strategy that companies exploit to manage and handle interactions with the customers and
potential customers and benefit enterprise to streamlines its processes, increase sales,
improve customer service and raises profitability. Hence, CRM can be used either as
technology, strategy or process so as to organisation necessary information to present a
complete record of business and individuals aiding management to understand the
relationship over time. CRM can be used and implemented in arrays of methods such as
social media, websites, chat, mail, and various marketing materials can all be synchronised
into a CRM solution.
In terms of technological platforms and software’s, Customer Relationship Management
systems include data warehouse technology, CRM systems for eCommerce, CRM software
such as software as a service (SaaS), all delivered via the internet with a typical recurring
subscription fee to the respective vendor. Each technological innovation is suited to the
different types of organisation with unique processes, however, similar functionalities (Souri,
Asghari and Rezaei, 2017). The CRM will do the work of centralizing information while
applying its functionalities in all types of organisations from SME having small databases
running well marketing campaigns to the enterprises of more than 500 employees’ with
multifaceted functionalities and users. Furthermore, CRM applications can be used and
embraced over any sort of industry whether manufacturing, insurance, finance or technology
as every industry and firms have a significant level of client base from which they seek to
gain reliable data and insights to serve them a better service of product.
There are many ways CRM can be used as the business tool and help in its positive growth
and development by connecting the customers and improves business performance. For
instance, with CRM tools and software’s, a business firm can discover the right customers
and in today’s competitive business environment, 79% of all marketing leads are never
converted to sales in the absence of CRM system (salesforce.com, 2020). Both marketing and
sales will have an inclusive view of leads and prospects and it will help them in creating and

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target engaging communications to turn prospects into consumers and reach reliable decision
much faster. It also helps business to develop more sustainable relationships by exploring
main challenges followed by engaging with relevancy and then scaling the business one-to-
one relationships.
In addition, the cost of sales can also be reduced with implementing the CRM applications
and systems like one can offset new customer acquisition costs via sales to the existing
customer base. Furthermore, it will help in gaining high visibility into the customers’
portfolio and in terms of upselling, cross-sell, and renewable opportunities. Adopting CRM
technology will also lead to increase in employee productivity while freeing them from heavy
process tasks and give further time to associate with the prospective customers, strengthening
relations with present one and ultimately driving the marketing function of the business (Lee,
Tang and Sugumaran, 2014). Lastly, businesses can exploit this tool a greater level of
customer retention as with transparency into the history of customer and various events, a
business can offer more satisfying experience and purchase that stimulate them to keep
coming back to the company.
CRM technology can be related to the course content as it shows the significance of digital
and new technologies in an ever-changing global business environment and the challenges
these present to the management in terms of effective implementation in the management
practices and organizational structure. In reference to course, it is necessary to develop an
awareness of the range, scope and complexity of the problems and concerns associated to the
strategic management of technology and innovation. There are various reasons to recognise
the importance of technology and innovation management and these include globalisation,
technological spillovers and reduced product life cycles and market segment. Considering the
demand pull in research and development, an innovation that originates from customer
suggestions; research is conducted to produce what is required (Pantano and Viassone, 2014).
CRM is also a part of internal innovation involved exploiting existing internal repository of
knowledge and discovering new ideas with relevant customer feedback flow through the
organisation.
The digital world offered radical new possibilities for developing new businesses, increasing
investment and marketing. It has developed a completely new sector of social enterprises and
relationships. Social innovation movements and digital technology are now inseparable while
encouraging one another creativity whereas some decades ago, they had no relationships at

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all. Essentially, technological evolution and development are changing people relationship
with each other, to the community and business firms. Considering relationship and
integration of technology in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), it results to be a
successful and productive type of business. Digital technology or digitization becomes the
key to improve customer satisfaction and Leeflang et al (2014) also stated that a digitally
equipped CRM is able to passes on the necessary information to the right customer
effortlessly and in a short period of time.
In relation with nature of relationship of digital technologies, digitalization disrupts various
business models while based on its ever faster emergence in the form of dependent
technologies such as blockchain, IoT, AR, it has changes population lives and organisational
practices from all sectors at a universal scale. Hence, it further helps in developing unlimited
potential in relation with innovation, efficiency, and improvement in productivity. Though,
research and practice still lack a basic understanding of the nature of digital technologies and
to fulfil the gap, various researchers and practitioners classifying digital technologies on two
levels of aggregation while making informed decisions about their implementation. Same like
innovation funnel, CRM funnel is a sales approach by which a business owner could track
and interact with potential and existing customers and allow them to discover who is willing
to purchase the products and who is not interested. It is like the way of approach in
innovation funnel that allows constant streams of ideas help in creating an innovative and
realistic action plan (Pohludka and Stverkova, 2019).
Furthermore, the digital world has grown to become vital to the functioning of the society and
an explosion in information technology is remaking the world leaving a few sides of society
untouched. Such a revolution has undergone a prompt speed making digitization to be
perceived as a positive force. For instance, the evolution of technology also making it for the
CRM to cost reasonably with further adapt to the continuous demands of the customers and
drive effective ways in terms of establishing a business. The integration of digital technology
in CRM have made it more effective with sheering the power digital evolution. In terms of
business outcomes, an enterprise wide digital transformations would be ineffective without a
clear focus on the ultimate business outcome and this makes it adopt CRM so as to transform
the operations while ensuring its features and capabilities.
In relation with emerging theories on business and management structure and practices, the
first is the contingency management theory stating that no management approach suits every

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business and there are various internal and external factors that will greatly impact the chosen
management approach. According to this theory, there are three key variables that directly
influence an organisational structure i.e. organization size, technology being employed and
leadership style. Similarly, the system management theory presents an alternative way to the
planning and management of organisations and as per this theory base, business success relies
upon various key elements such as interdependence, interrelations between various
subsystems and synergy. At a glance, some of these theories are developed centuries ago and
some of these are emerging and all offering a stable framework for the effective functioning
of the business.
Ultimately, this course draws on strategic management, digital business and new technologies
addressing significant challenges faced by management and businesses in the competitive
business environment. With changes in technology, the new insights are also developing
necessary for the business to manage its innovation process and to introduce tools that help in
assessing technology and making complex decisions under uncertainty. The chosen
technology in this report was CRM and it is both a management function and a technology
that deals with integrating all the business processes and help an organisation to make it see
its major areas of growth. There’s never has been a better or easier time to implement a CRM
into the existing business structure and with new functionalities of CRM, there are more
chances for the organisations to develop better relationships with the customers. Such
practice will give business a big step forward and allow them to offer personalised offerings
and networks.

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References
Athanasoulias, G. and Chountalas, P. (2017) Managing customer relationships: a
comprehensive literature review and future directions. International Journal of Decision
Sciences, Risk and Management, 7(1/2), pp.70-87.
Giannakis-Bompolis, C. and Boutsouki, C. (2014) Customer relationship management in the
era of social web and social customer: an investigation of customer engagement in the Greek
retail banking sector. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 148(1), pp.67-78.
Lee, Y.C., Tang, N.H. and Sugumaran, V. (2014) Open source CRM software selection using
the analytic hierarchy process. Information Systems Management, 31(1), pp.2-20.
Leeflang, P.S., Verhoef, P.C., Dahlström, P. and Freundt, T. (2014) Challenges and solutions
for marketing in a digital era. European management journal, 32(1), pp.1-12.
Pantano, E. and Viassone, M. (2014) Demand pull and technology push perspective in
technology-based innovations for the points of sale: The retailers evaluation. Journal of
Retailing and Consumer Services, 21(1), pp.43-47.
Pohludka, M. and Stverkova, H. (2019) The best practice of CRM implementation for small-
and medium-sized enterprises. Administrative Sciences, 9(1), p.22.
salesforce.com. (2020) 6 ways CRM helps you grow your business. [ONLINE] Available
from: https://www.salesforce.com/in/crm/what-is-crm/how-crm-improves-business/
[Accessed 28/03/2020].
Soltani, Z. and Navimipour, N.J. (2016) Customer relationship management mechanisms: A
systematic review of the state of the art literature and recommendations for future
research. Computers in Human Behavior, 61(1), pp.667-688.
Souri, A., Asghari, P. and Rezaei, R. (2017) Software as a service based CRM providers in
the cloud computing: challenges and technical issues. Journal of Service Science
Research, 9(2), pp.219-237.
talisma.com. (2018) Digital transformation with CRM [ONLINE] Available from:
https://www.talisma.com/digital-transformation-with-crm/ [Accessed 28/03/2020].