Exploring CRM adoption in Chinese SOEs: insights from a case study

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, which are advanced enterprise information system (IS) packages, have been widely perceived by modern companies as a strategic tool to manage and maintain effective relationships with customers, as well as to satisfy their growing demands on high quality services and products. The study reported in this paper aimed to explore the state of the art of CRM adoption in Chinese companies, in particular State-Owned Enterprises (SOE). By using a case study approach, the research adopted a questionnaire survey as the main method of data collection. The questionnaire findings showed that a range of independent and isolated sales and customer-related applications (including sales and marketing systems, accounting systems, and human resources systems) have been used by the case company. However, an integrated CRM system seems to be currently missing in Chinese SOEs. These findings pointed out a strong need for SOEs to replace their legacy and isolated sales-related systems by an integrated CRM package, in order to satisfy the increasingly high demand of customers under the current very competitive market conditions in China.