مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد رویکرد وفاداری مشتری بر اساس CRM برای SME ها – امرالد 2017

The current and competitive market is characterized by changes in technology and consumer preferences that occur quickly (Amalnick and Zadeh, 2017). This makes it increasingly important for companies to provide their customers with a personalized service and has led to small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) investing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (Reicher and Szeghegyi, 2015). SMEs, despite it being difficult for them to survive in the market, are important to the economy of several countries, since they create jobs, their presence and impact add to social cohesion and this ensures that economic activity is diversified (Lussier et al., 2016). However, SMEs have less access to formal sources of external financing despite these contributions (Rostamkalaei and Freel, 2016) and their resources are limited, which hinders their ability to grow and to draw up and implement strategies that can quickly take advantage of rapid technological changes (Wong et al., 2016; Eriksson et al., 2017). Thus, it is relevant to study the relationship of SMEs with their customers and to find new ways of establishing and maintaining this relationship (Soltani and Navimipour, 2016). Such studies first of all seek to understand the essential characteristics of SMEs and then to use this information with a view to contributing towards helping them to develop and to improve the quality of their products and services and how best to manage them. Customers’ behavior has changed. They have become more engaged in ensuring they receive what they want and this means that they have become more demanding about receiving services of a high standard (Lipiäinen, 2015). This requires more transparency and authenticity in company-customer relationships (Greenberg, 2010). It is noteworthy that, despite limitations and challenges, there has been a marked increase in the number and range of initiatives that SMEs have taken in the areas of technology and marketing, especially in CRM and in relation to engaging on more efficient relationship management with their customers. Their aim has been to reach and maintain competitive differentials (Kafetzopoulos and Psomas, 2016; Morgan-Thomas, 2016; Gonzalez-Benito, Trindade Venturini and Gonzalez-Benito, 2017). Practices of placing the focus on the customer and on quality management, for example, contribute to improving SMEs’ organizational performance, as they tend to be more flexible than large organizations (Chuang and Lin, 2013; Basu and Bhola, 2016). Traditional CRM models are proposed for large companies. This is because they, unlike SMEs, do not need to consider peculiarities. The need to pay attention to their individual peculiarities is a major limitation for SMEs, because, due to their specific characteristics, they require a non-general methodology, adapted to their reality, in order to attend to their stakeholders’ needs (Jorge et al., 2016; Zhou, 2016). The need to address and investigate this is what has prompted this research study.