Multidimensional appraisal of customer relationship management: integrating balanced scorecard and multi criteria decision making approaches

This paper presents a comprehensive integrative framework for measuring the performance of customer relationship management (CRM) system based on a detailed empirical study of 32 Iranian internet service provider (ISP) firms. At first, by an extensive literature review and experts who have real practical experiences in the field of CRM, appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) based on four perspectives of balanced scorecard have been extracted. Then, due to the interdependency and feedback among these KPIs, multiple criteria decision making techniques are used to evaluate CRM performance. Specifically, this study first applies the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory approach to determine the interrelated relationships among criteria, and to find the crucial central and influential factors. Then, the analytical network process method is used to obtain the criterion weights. Finally, according to these previous results, the technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution method is adopted to analyze the CRM performance of 32 Iranian ISP firms. The results of this study illustrated that learning and growth is the most crucial influential perspective and it would influence on the other perspectives much more. Furthermore, indicators including organization capital, human capital, customer retention process, customer perceived value, and customer expansion process play an essential role in succeeding of CRM. The results of this study can provide a comprehensive insight for managers into discerning how and through which mechanisms CRM can create merits for the organizations.