A case study of emergent and intentional organizational change: some implications for customer relationship management success

The shift from a product-oriented business strategy to a customer-focused one has been a major change agent in companies. Many companies have invested heavily in technologies enabling a customer-focused relationship marketing strategy. However, there are mixed results as to how successful firms have been in implementing customer relationship management systems. The challenge of managing organizational change has been raised as a potential factor affecting the successful outcome of CRM efforts. Our argument is that the proposed relationship between CRM success and organizational change should be made more explicit in order to thoroughly investigate this challenge. Our paper contributes to this by presenting the results of an exploratory single case study. We identified several change events on different observational levels. Our findings suggest that to succeed, one should first identify both emergent and planned change processes. Then one could evaluate, whether change events - triggered by these processes - might effect one another in a way which could endanger the successful CRM implementation outcome.