Title: The factors affecting adoption of CRM at organisational level in Iran's shipping industry

Authors: Seyed Hessameddin Zegordi, Navid Fakhredaei

Addresses: Industrial Engineering Department, School of Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Al-Ahmad Ave., Tehran, Iran. ' Industrial Engineering Department, School of Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Al-Ahmad Ave., Tehran, Iran

Abstract: For a global competitive market, CRM can bring a lot of advantages. But few CRM vendors have crafted transportation industry specific applications. This research can help them to influence the adoption process of CRM at organisational level and also find out what motivates the adoption of CRM and related technologies in this industry. This research is trying to find out the factors affecting the adoption of CRM at organisational level in Iran|s shipping industry. The data has been collected from 50 companies which have been selected randomly. It was found out that adopter characteristics (attitude toward change and perceived CRM knowledge), environmental hostility (market uncertainty, environmental hostility) and perceived CRM characteristics (CRM relative advantage, CRM complexity, CRM trialability, CRM switching cost and CRM compatibility) all have positive effect on intention to adopt CRM. Among these three sets of factors, adopter characteristics have more effect on intention to adopt CRM.

Keywords: customer relationship management; shipping industry; Iran; innovation adoption; global markets; competitive markets; transportation industry; adopter characteristics; change; perceived knowledge; CRM knowledge; environmental hostility; market uncertainty; perceived characteristics; CRM characteristics; relative advantage; CRM complexity; CRM trialability; CRM switching costs; CRM compatibility; business information systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIS.2011.041790

International Journal of Business Information Systems, 2011 Vol.8 No.2, pp.165 - 191

Published online: 30 Sep 2014 *

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