Introduction

In an integrated global market, firms face strict competition in all sectors. To maintain their existing market share and to reach out to potential market demand, firms should pay close attention to their customer relationship management (CRM). The benefits of CRM systems may be great on overall customer service experience, marketing, and sales. For example, statistics from industries show that CRM gives an average return of $8.71 for every $1 spent, according to Nucleus Research; CRM can increase revenue by a whopping 41% according to Trackvia.com. Because firm executives from a wide variety of industries tout CRM’s value, CRM system sales are soaring. According to Gartner, CRM software revenue reached $39.5 billion worldwide in 2017, and it will continue to be the largest and fastest growing software market. CRM systems are among the many types of enterprise systems. Their main functions are embedded in the business processes of firms that are related to customers, such as marketing, customer service, and customer data analysis. CRM implementation is a vital step in any CRM strategy, which, if successful, results in improved performance. However, a large percentage of firms often fail to meet their expectations of CRM implementation [26]. Therefore, corporate managers should have a profound understanding of the major targets, necessary conditions, and evaluation methods of CRM implementation. In the practical sense, marketing research scholars and information systems (IS) scholars have raised a specific research question related to the business value of CRM [61,62]. This question focuses on the performance outcome of CRM implementation, as well as on the factors that influence such performance outcome. Existing empirical studies on CRM value can be classified into two streams. The first stream explains the underlying reasons (including the influencing and moderating factors) behind CRM value creation on the basis of theories such as customer relationship strategy, organizational resources, and information technology (IT)/IS usage; however, most of the studies under this stream conduct surveys among managers using subjective performance metrics [1,4,14,16,23,24,39,60,63,75] or internal data from certain companies [35,36,47]. The aforementioned studies require further examination using objective measurements to improve their reliability. The second stream focuses on the absolute influence of CRM on firm performance. Studies under this stream use objective data to measure the direct correlations between CRM and profitability or stock price performance. Existing evidence suggests that a firm’s stock price incurs an abnormal return around CRM implementation announcements [20,47]. However, CRM lacks a significant long-term influence on profitability ratios and stock prices compared with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) [5,32].