A FRAMEWORK FOR WEB-BASED E-COMMERCECUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Conservative estimates indicate that electronic commerce will expand at a rapid pace. Despite these projections, e-commerce firms are faced with a serious challenge: how to acquire and keep customers in a marketplace where competitors are a click away. Many e-commerce firms are turning to web-based customer relationship management (CRM) as a way to establish strong customer relationships. However, this type of customer service is relatively new and not well understood. What options are e-commerce firms using to provide customer service? This paper describes preliminary findings of ongoing research investigating the role and importance of trust in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce. The research reported here focuses on the development of an empirically grounded framework for web-based CRM. Based on a content analysis of 241 B2C web sites, a framework is proposed that stratifies web-based CRM on the bases of interactivity and temporality. This framework helps us differentiate among the range of activities e-commerce firms are using to manage customer relationships online. It paves the way for studies of web-based CRM on both sides of the interface, allowing us to investigate such issues as the relative effectiveness of these options, the costs for the firms that implement them, the impacts of these options on the productivity of the firm, the effects of implementation on work flow in the firm, and the ways in which consumers make use of these options.