Ubiquitous customer relationship management : unforeseen issues and benefits

Convergence of pervasive technologies, techno-centric customers and the emergence of digitized channels, overabundance of user friendly retail applications are having a profound impact on retail experience, leading to the advent of ‘everywhere retailing’. With the rapid uptake of digital complimentary assets and smart mobile applications are revolutionizing the relationship of retailers with their customers and suppliers. Retail firms are increasingly investing substantial resources on dynamic Customer Relationship Management systems (D-CRM / U-CRM) to better engage with customers to sense and respond quickly (Agility of the firm) to their demands. However, unlike traditional CRM systems, engagement with U-CRM systems requires that firms be hyper sensitive to volatile customer needs and wants. Following the notions of firm agility, this study attempts to develop a framework to understand such unforeseen benefits and issues of U-CRM. This research-in-progress paper reports an a-priory framework including 62 U-CRM benefits derived through an archival analysis of literature.

The affordances of social technology : a BPM perspective

Increasingly, organizations are looking to employ Social Technology (ST) to enhance their capability with Business Process Improvement (BPI). However, little is known about how the characteristics or qualities of ST actually influence an organizations' capability at Business Process Improvement (BPI). This paper discusses the potential role of ST in process improvement by presenting an a-priory model derived by an investigation of extant research. First, the qualities of social technology that potentially support high level action possibilities related to BPI are presented (we refer to these as affordances), next these affordances are mapped to the De Bruin (2009) BPM Maturity model as a first step to understanding how ST influences BPI. This work is expected to contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the relationship between ST and BPI, and will extend existing theory on Business Process Management capability and maturity.