Can customer relationship management create customer agility and superior firms’ performance?

Abstract

The growing importance of Customer relationship management (CRM) and agility in any business are universally accepted and extensively investigated in different disciplines. However, lacking empirical evidence for the suggested theoretical framework of agility and their interrelationships with CRM and superior’s financial performance hinders its application in the practices. Thus, this study attempted to address this issue by drawing on the Resource-Advantage theory of sustainable competitive advantages to examine a mechanism through which CRM implementation can generate sustainable competitive and achieve superior financial performance using the Vietnamese tourism industry context. The framework was tested on data collected from 231 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings suggested that different types of CRM processes do not equally influence customer agility, and not all attributes of customer agility exert positive impacts on firms’ performance as well. Also, CRM performance measurement systems were found to moderate these effects positively and substantially. Several practical implications were also derived from the research findings.