Customer Relationship Management in Professional Service Organizations: An Application to the Building Industry

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications have gained primary attention in large service industry sectors, such as the financial, telecommunications and hotel industries. However, relatively few researchers have studied CRM in the context of Professional Service Organizations (PSOs). PSOs are found across a broad spectrum of service offerings and they share several key aspects. Some of these aspects include the following: PSOs are high in people-processing features, have close contact with customers, and are high in credence attributes. Given this critical reliance on the customer, most PSOs would benefit from implementing a CRM system to facilitate their business and sustain customer relationships. This paper compares marketing practices and client management approaches in PSOs between those utilizing and those not utilizing a CRM system. The building industry is used as a case study. The paper introduces the CRM concept, describing its significance to the building industry and presents the methodology and findings from an exploratory research investigation. It also presents a framework for CRM applications in PSOs and highlights a future research agenda tempered by some limitations of the research study.