Twenty Years of CRM Implementation Research: An Investigation of CRM Critical Success and Failure Factors (CSFs and CFFs)

The market competition urges companies to invest heavily in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) projects to gain a better understanding of the customers. Nevertheless, the successful implementation of CRM seems to be difficult to achieve. Researches show that less than 30 percent of organizations that implement a CRM technology have seen an improvement in organization performance. Hence, a more than 70 percent rate of failure for CRM projects is an alarm for organizations to provide the required arrangements prior to the CRM implementation. This paper aims to consider two research questions: How has CRM implementation research evolved over the past 20 years? What are the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and Critical Failure Factors (CFFs) for CRM implementation? To answer these questions, the authors conducted an in-depth review of CRM implementation research for the last 20 years and analyzed the content of 214 selected papers (published from January 2000 to January 2020). Then CSFs and CFFs were classified and prioritized. Finally, the work proposes a covering definition of the success factors based on the literature review. Acknowledging the growth of studies on CRM implementation, this paper presents the latest picture of the discipline and hopes that understanding these 24 CSFs and 15 CFFs would help organizations to obtain the expected benefits of their CRM initiative.