R. Meersman, P. Herrero, and T. Dillon (Eds.): OTM 2009 Workshops, LNCS 5872, pp. 484–493, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 CRM System Implementation in a Multinational Enterprise Alok Mishra and Deepti Mishra Department of Computer Engineering Atilim University, Ankara, Turkey alok@atilim.edu.tr, deepti@atilim.edu.tr Abstract. The concept of customer relationship management (CRM) resonates with managers in today’s competitive economy. As more and more organizations realize the significance of becoming customer-centric in today’s competitive era, they embrace CRM as a core business strategy. CRM an integration of information technology and relationship marketing provides the infrastructure that facilitates long-term relationship building with customers at an enterprise-wide level. Successful CRM implementation is a complex, expensive and rarely technical projects. This paper presents the successful implementation of CRM in a multinational organization. This study will facilitate in understanding transition, constraints and implementation of CRM in multinational enterprises. Keywords: Customer Relationship Management, CRM, Implementation. 1 Introduction As the business environment is dramatically changing, companies today face the challenge of increasing competition, expanding markets, and rising customer expectations (Wu, 2008). A good customer relationship is the key to business success. Relationship building and management, or what has been labeled as relationship marketing, is a leading approach to marketing [11]. The use of customer relationship management (CRM) systems is becoming increasingly important to improve customer life time value [27]. So more and more businesses begin to attach great importance to electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), which focuses on customers instead of products or services, that is, considering customer’s needs in all aspects of a business, ensuring customers’ satisfaction. By providing information on customer data, profiles and history they support important areas of a company’s core processes, especially in marketing, sales and service [7]. eCRM is all about optimising profitability and enabled businesses to keep customers under control, as it makes the customer feel they are really a part of the business progress [22]. In spite of the wide use of sales force automation systems in sales [20], a Forrester study [3] observes significant deficits in today’s marketing, sales and service processes. It was found that just 22% of the companies surveyed possess a uniform customer view and only 37% know which customers are looked after by the individual business units [1]. To eliminate weaknesses in customer contact, many companies are