Abstract
Customer involvement in product and service development (CIPS) is recognized as important for firms; yet the role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating CIPS is understudied. We examine two enterprise technologies which improve knowledge available to decision makers: Business Intelligence (BI) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While CRM provides transactional information and knowledge about customers, BI provides market-sensing and analytics capabilities to leverage customer knowledge. Drawing on this theoretical basis, we posit that BI and CRM, individually and in combination, facilitate CIPS. Our large-sample empirical analysis of U.S. firms broadly supports our propositions. In supplementary analysis, we find that CIPS is associated with higher likelihood of benefits from customer-management systems in terms of development of new or improved products/services resulting from customer feedback. This suggests that customers can be effective contributors to innovation-related value from IT. Our study contributes by showing the role of BI and CRM in CIPS.
Recommended Citation
Saldanha, Terence and Krishnan, Mayuram, "BI and CRM for Customer Involvement in Product and Service Development" (2011). ICIS 2011 Proceedings. 14.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2011/proceedings/knowledge/14
BI and CRM for Customer Involvement in Product and Service Development
Customer involvement in product and service development (CIPS) is recognized as important for firms; yet the role of Information Technology (IT) in facilitating CIPS is understudied. We examine two enterprise technologies which improve knowledge available to decision makers: Business Intelligence (BI) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). While CRM provides transactional information and knowledge about customers, BI provides market-sensing and analytics capabilities to leverage customer knowledge. Drawing on this theoretical basis, we posit that BI and CRM, individually and in combination, facilitate CIPS. Our large-sample empirical analysis of U.S. firms broadly supports our propositions. In supplementary analysis, we find that CIPS is associated with higher likelihood of benefits from customer-management systems in terms of development of new or improved products/services resulting from customer feedback. This suggests that customers can be effective contributors to innovation-related value from IT. Our study contributes by showing the role of BI and CRM in CIPS.