By Fon Sundaravej
Implementation Team Responsiveness and User Evaluation of Customer
Relationship Management: A Quasi-Experimental Design Study of Social Exchange
Theory
By David Gefen and Catherine M. Ridings
The objective of this article is to examine whether a degree of actual
responsiveness to users is a plausible cause of the users’ new IT project approval. The
previous research use a cross-sectional survey which demonstrates only the association
between the user perception of the responsiveness and the assessment of the new system
and its adoption. However, the survey data alone are inadequate to determine the
causation. Consequently, this study applies a quasi-experimental design to establish
causation by demonstrating differences in output variables between treatment groups.
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, which is a module of Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP), is employed in this context because it requires extensive
configuration and interaction between users and the technical implementation team. As a
result of such tremendous interaction, the hypotheses in this study are based upon the
Social Exchange Theory (SET).
The authors discuss a background of CRM and SET theories, including their
association. A company adopts ERP software basically because of its ability to integrate
all business processes to improve a company’s business management. CRM system is an
enhanced ERP that specializes in integrating, managing, and synthesizing every aspect of
customer transactions in an organization. Due to the tremendous increase of e-commerce,
globalization, competition, and expectation on customer service, users now become one
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By Fon Sundaravej
of the most significant factors for a project success or failure. Thus, the success of the
CRM implementation requires accurate and extensive configuration and responsiveness
to users’ requests.
In SET, an interaction between people is viewed as an exchange of intangible
costs and benefits such as respect, honor, friendship, and caring. Such exchange cannot
be managed by a rule or agreement. That means the reciprocal return from the investment
of the other party is not guarantee. People have to rely on their trust in a cooperation of
the other party.
To deploy the CRM, the interaction between users and the implementation team
contains some aspects of SET. The extensive responsiveness is a nature of CRM
implementation. Users expect a positive relationship with the implementation team for a
new IT system implementation that would help improve their work procedures. A high
degree of the responsiveness, accordingly, is believed to result in the adoption of the
CRM.
The authors of this article construct several hypotheses based upon the association
between two aforementioned theories. They assume that users who receive increased
implementation team responsiveness will perceive higher degrees of implementation
team responsiveness and cooperation intentions and will assess the correctness of the
CRM configuration more favorably. The increased user perception of the implementation
team’s responsiveness will also be associated with increased perception of the correctness
of the CRM configuration and the implementation team’s cooperative intentions.
Additionally, the authors believe that the increased user perception of the implementation
team’s cooperative intentions will be associated with increased perception of the
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By Fon Sundaravej
correctness of the CRM configuration. At the end, such increased user perception of the
correctness of the CRM configuration will result in a higher likelihood that the users will
approve of the CRM.
The study is made in a large telecommunications company based in the United
States to assess a new CRM system adoption. In the quasi-experiment, each group or site
receives a unique treatment. The outcomes of different sites will be measured and
compared to assess whether the different treatments causes different outcome variables.
The plausible causation, not only a correlation, can be assessed from the quasiexperiment design.
The collected data from the experiment support most hypotheses of the authors.
The result confirms that the configuration correctness affects the user approval and is
affected by the perceived responsiveness and the cooperative intentions. The cooperative
intentions are affected by the perceived responsiveness. This can be interpreted that the
treatment group with a high degree of responsiveness from the implementation team
perceives the intention of more responsiveness and cooperation. This treatment group
also better assesses the CRM configuration and willingly adopts the CRM than the
treatment group with simply routine support from the implementation team. It can be
concluded from the experiment that the extensive interaction between users and the
implementation team during the implementation of a CRM influences user assessments
about the CRM and ultimately affects user willingness to adopt the system.
Mangers gain benefits from this study by being aware that a user is an essential
element to test the configuration correctness and system approval. To stimulate users’
belief about the new system, an accurate and prompt responsiveness from the
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By Fon Sundaravej
implementation team to the users’ requests is a key answer. On the other hand, an
implementation team with a slow response to the users’ requests likely produces an
unpleasant impression and incorporation from users.
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