Documentation and continuous development of processes for customer management: Implications for profitable growth

Jaakko Aspara

Australasian marketing journal, 2011, vol. 19, issue 4, 267-280

Abstract: This article examines how the systematic documentation and continuous development of customer management (CM) processes to be utilized by a firm’s customer-facing personnel, contribute to the firm’s profitable (sales) growth. The examination is based on management/organization theory on process management, as applied to CM processes. Testing their hypotheses with survey data concerning the customer acquisition and retention processes of a set of firms, the authors find that explicit process documentation contributes to profitable growth, in as much as it facilitates the daily work of the customer-facing personnel (especially sales and marketing people). In contrast, the direct effect of process documentation on profitable growth is found to be non-existent – suggesting that if the documented CM processes do not truly facilitate the daily work of customer-facing personnel, the process documentation may be counterproductive. The authors also find that continuous efforts to develop the CM processes have positive influence on profitable growth – as does sales personnel’s and market-analysis personnel’s participation in the process development. In conditions of high turbulence in the market environment, the continuous development of CM processes becomes even more important.

Keywords: Organization theory; Process management; Customer management; Customer relationship management; CRM; Customer acquisition; Customer retention; Firm performance; Documentation; Continuous development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1441358211000607
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aumajo:v:19:y:2011:i:4:p:267-280

DOI: 10.1016/j.ausmj.2011.07.002

Access Statistics for this article

Australasian marketing journal is currently edited by Roger Marshall

More articles in Australasian marketing journal from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().