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Value-based Customer Relationship Management

Contact: Dr. Florian Probst

Customer orientation has been a central success factor for corporate activities since the beginning of the 1980s. Since then, particularly customer relations have become increasingly important due to stagnating markets and increasing competitive pressure, new technological developments, and changing customer needs.

In this context, there has been a shift from maximizing short-term transactions toward building up valuable long-term customer relationships. Therefore, more and more companies consider customer relations as an important asset and part of their value chain. Against this background, it is not surprising that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) moves ever more into the focus of business decisions.

The research group value-based CRM at the FIM Research Center intends to foster the interdisciplinary discourse between value-based management and CRM. Thereby, we link concepts and methods from marketing, financial management, and information management. With value-based CRM as central link, our research, teaching, and collaboration with industry center around Social Media, Sustainability, and Data Quality.

Please follow the links above or within the figure below to find a detailed description of our focus within these research areas and selected publications. Further information regarding our collaboration with industry, our activities to foster the knowledge exchange between industry and science, and our overall teaching concept can be found below.

Research Areas

Collaboration with Industry

The research group value-based CRM investigates relevant real-world problems in cooperation with partners from industry. Thereby, we co-create unique and first-of-a-kind solutions by bringing together our insights into the scientific state of the art, practical experience, as well as the interdisciplinary nature and enthusiasm of our team. Selected projects are (see more projects in German):

  • Radeberger Gruppe, 2013: Evaluation of Sustainability Key Performance Indicators and Design of a Concept for Sustainability Controlling and Reporting 

  • Hilti AG, 2013: Identification of use cases and evaluation of technologies for communication and collaboration in distributed teams

  • Hilti AG, 2012: Concept, design, and implementation of a internal collaboration and document management platform for teams and projects

  • Siemens AG, 2009: Concept for the valuation of a CRM system and a communication plan for its introduction (see publication of results in Wirtschaftsinformatik & Management)

  • Siemens AG, 2007 - 2008: Increasing productivity and sales force success by CRM investments (see detailed description in German)

 

Knowledge Exchange between Industry and Science

Despite projects with partners from industry, the research group value-based CRM contributes to several conferences and events that focus on the knowledge transfer to practitioners and among researchers, such as:

 

Teaching

Our course Customer Relationship Management for Bachelor students constitutes the cornerstone of our teaching activities in the field of value-based CRM.

Concept_CRM_BSc_small

 

Subsequently, we offer the possibility to specialize in Social Media, Sustainability, or Data Quality within our research seminars and seminars with partners from industry. While the research seminar is particularly designed to provide first experience in scientific work by writing a state of the art article, the seminar in cooperation with Allianz offers the possibility to get valuable insights from business practice as well as project management experience. Both, the research and the practice seminar prepare for writing a Bachelor or Master thesis by introducing the most important formal and methodological requirements.

Master students are eligible for our project seminar "Business & Information Systems Engineering IV", which deals with boundary-spanning topics between value-based CRM and value-based Business Process Management (BPM). For students of the Elite Graduate Program FIM, we also offer the course "Value-Based Customer Relationship and Process Management" (see corresponding syllabus in German).

Finally, we also offer Bachelor and Master thesis topics related to these research areas. An overview can be found in our presentation on Bachelor and Master thesis topics (in German).

Value-based CRM Data Quality