Effektives Customer Relationship Management durch Intermediation

Bestehende Modelle im Customer Relationship Management (CRM) weisen diverse Schwachstellen auf. Erstens sind viele Kunden durch die große zu verarbeitende Informationsmenge überfordert, zweitens gelingt es vielen Anbietern nicht, die Konsistenz und Relevanz der gesammelten Kundendaten zu gewährleisten, und drittens bringen Kunden den Anbietern nicht das Vertrauen entgegen, das für eine umfassendere Offenlegung von Kundendaten erforderlich wäre. Durch die Einschaltung eines Intermediärs können diese Schwachstellen gemildert werden. Zusätzlich bietet die Intermediation die Möglichkeit, Transaktionskosten zu senken, die Macht der Kunden zu bündeln und die Beziehungen zu Kunden zu intensivieren. Ermöglicht wird dies durch die engere Verknüpfung der Kommunikations- und der Einkaufsfunktionalitäten des Internets. Als Erfolgsfaktoren gilt es, die kritische Masse und das erforderliche Vertrauen zu erreichen sowie einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Wertschöpfung zu leisten.

Die Bedeutung von Business Rules im Customer Relationship Management

Der Beitrag diskutiert Möglichkeiten zur Automatisierung von Kundenbeziehungsprozessen im Customer Relationship Management mit Hilfe von Business Rules. Anhand einer CRM-Architektur werden Anwendungsmöglichkeiten erörtert und am Beispiel einer Cross-Selling-Kampagne vertieft. Technische Aspekte werden dabei nicht im Detail betrachtet. Der Schwerpunkt liegt vielmehr in der Diskussion von Automatisierungs- und Integrationspotenzialen durch den Einsatz von Business Rules, wie sie in zunehmend individualisierten Kundenbeziehungen in Massenmärkten gegeben sind.

Fuzzy Online Reputation Analysis Framework

The fuzzy online reputation analysis framework, or “foRa” (plural of forum, the Latin word for marketplace) framework, is a method for searching the Social Web to find meaningful information about reputation. Based on an automatic, fuzzy-built ontology, this framework queries the social marketplaces of the Web for reputation, combines the retrieved results, and generates navigable Topic Maps. Using these interactive maps, communications operatives can zero in on precisely what they are looking for and discover unforeseen relationships between topics and tags. Thus, using this framework, it is possible to scan the Social Web for a name, product, brand, or combination thereof and determine query-related topic classes with related terms and thus identify hidden sources. This chapter also briefly describes the youReputation prototype (www.youreputation.org), a free web-based application for reputation analysis. In the course of this, a small example will explain the benefits of the prototype.

Service Brand Relationship Quality: Hot or Cold?

Customers’ long-term brand relations are crucial drivers of a service brand’s sustainable competitive advantage. This research empirically examines the quality of customer-service brand relationships in the context of an airline’s frequent flyer program. The authors show that service brand relationship quality (BRQ) involves both a hot (based on emotions) and a cold (based on objectrelevant beliefs) component. They find that these two components have different implications for a service brand’s performance and are at least partially driven by different antecedents whose relative importance changes over time. Specifically, cold BRQ is important for word-of-mouth behavior and is strongly driven by partner quality (i.e., the generalized assessment of the brand in its role as a relationship counterpart). Hot BRQ, on the other hand, has a stronger impact on willingness to pay a price premium and consideration set size. In early stages of a customer-brand relationship hot BRQ is more strongly driven by self-congruence (i.e., consumer’s perception of the fit between his/her self and the brand’s personality), in later stages partner quality becomes more relevant. The authors discuss the implications of their findings for the development of BRQ and the implementation of alternative growth strategies in a services context.

The relationship between top management team innovation orientation and firm growth: The mediating role of firm innovativeness

Upper echelon theory and research on innovation have considered top management teams and their behaviour and characteristics as important factors that positively influence innovativeness and organizational outcomes. Yet, innovation research has mostly focused on individual new product projects, and their performance and impact on firm performance. Recent research has started to apply a more holistic view in terms of innovation, by considering firm-wide innovation instead of single new products. Upper echelon research has concentrated on direct relationships between top management team characteristics and organizational outcomes. But recent research calls for mediating effects of the relationship between top management team characteristics and organizational outcomes. Hence, this study introduces firm innovativeness as a mediator between top management team innovation orientation and firm growth. Focusing on small and medium-sized firms, which often represent highly innovative firms, results show that firm innovativeness fully mediates the relationship between top management team innovation orientation and firm growth. Implications and future research are discussed.