Customer over employee? : the implications of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for organisational structures and labour quality
book
This paper for the Emergence WWWe (The World, the Workplace and We, the workers)-Conference E-Work in a Global World, Brussels 16 & 17 April 2002, explores the effects of the increasing popular ICT application suite Customer Relationship Management (CRM) on organisational structures, corporate culture, work and employment. Many organisations have recently adopted a distinctive customer oriented strategy, focussing no longer on functionality's and internal processes, but on interaction with the environment and the creation of added value for different customer groups. Advanced information technology plays a major role in facilitating and even shaping this new strategy. In this paper the results are presented of exploratory research in the influence of CRM on work and employment in 3 front running Dutch corporations: a bank, a recreation company and a telecom company. A panel of 305 companies has been used to validate a number of results. This research shows the implementation of a CRM-strategy to trigger a vast reshaping of organisational structures. Although unambiguous employment consequences could not be observed, effects on corporate culture and labour quality were conspicuous.
TNO Identifier
274527
Publisher
Information Society Technologies (IST)
Collation
17 p.
Place of publication
Brussels