IT Practices and Customer Satisfaction At 138 Large Firms

This paper explores what high-performing firms specifically do to gain the greatest benefits from their IT investments. It identifies several IT-specific factors such as Data/Process Standardization, Systems Integration and Application Integration as practices that are correlated with significant IT impact on a key business performance metric: customer satisfaction. The firms interviewed in this study represent large companies that invest significantly in enterprise software applications such as customer relationship management, sales force automation, enterprise resource planning and knowledge management. Through a set of matched interviews with multiple respondents at 138 firms, we identify several concrete practices as well as cultural variables that are associated with positive IT impact on customer satisfaction, and perhaps equally importantly, several practices where the effects are not positive.

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