Technical, Organizational and Cross-cultural issues associated with the deployment of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in Transnational and Global Multicultural Organizations

Abstract In the past few years the way in which, organizations, companies and corporations structure themselves has given a 180 degrees turnaround, switching from a structure based in products to a structure based in customers. The first big change was the introduction and use of Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP) like SAP and Oracle. Those ERP systems changed the way in which the information was managed in large corporations including now a central database and visualizing the structures and functions of the corporation by business processes and not by business areas. Also lately with the advent of the WEB 2.0, the boom of the social media and the big data analytics areas, business, marketing and the relation with the customer has totally changed. One of the most important drivers for this turnaround is the adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is supporting software designed to improve the relation with the current customers (loyalty) using modern social media and massive marketing technologies. This paper introduces the organizational issues of cross-cultural communication associated with the integration between marketing, customer service, and complaint management with information technology. In highly competitive environments a lot of organizations intent to construct a relationship with their current customers, since the cost involved in capturing new ones is a lot higher than the cost of retaining the current ones. The most crucial factor is the understanding of the clients and their values, norms, traditions, language, religions, perceptions, thoughts in few words their culture. So this cultural dimension analysis is essential and the development of a formal taxonomy or cultural concern framework a need. This paper will deal with the dimension concerns from the technical, cultural and organizational point of view needed to build this framework in order to avoid the terrible consequences of a wrong interaction with the customers due to cultural issues.