Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a complex and revolutionary strategic management concept that aims at integrating organizational functions so as to present consumers with a single face of the organization. To this end, the presentation of this face of the company must be agreed upon by the multi-functional teams in the organization, especially regarding what the face of the organization is and/or how it should be presented. A number of critical success factors must apply if the implementation of CRM is to succeed. This study investigated the possibility of integrating the critical success factors (CSF) of customer relationship management (CRM), customer satisfaction and customer retention in the oil and gas sector in the United Arab Emirates. It was proposed to culminate in a framework/model for successfully implementing CRM and/or to provide an integrative perspective on the critical success factors of doing so in an international customer context in the UAE oil and gas industry. The present empirical study of this industry would help fill the current gap in explorations of the role of CRM and its applicability to both the UAE and other fuel exporting countries and could be used by CSF/enablers for successful CRM Implementation. CRM has proved useful in several industries, including banking, hospitality, healthcare and retailing. The research hypothesized that CRM, by virtue of aiming to develop and consolidate the vendor-to-customer relationship, could also be successfully implemented in the oil and gas sector to ensure sustainability, competitive advantage and higher levels of customer retention and satisfaction. The research and its hypotheses used data from on UAE’s leading oil and gas entity – Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), which often deals in local and international business to business transactions.
Critical path analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to conduct the study. The critical path analysis revealed that, of all the dependent variables, human factors were important to the successful implementation of CRM and critical for determining the quality of transactions and relations. This justifies the contention of previous scholars that CRM promotes the usefulness of technology and human resources in the study of consumer behavior in delivering more value to consumers if their preferences can be identified. Overall, the research found that, although CRM allows consumer behavior to be studied, its success depends on building relationships with consumers based on identified preferences and unique behaviors. The study is implicatively useful for marketing and management practitioners in the oil and gas industry from fuel exporting countries which deal specifically with B2B international customers and seek to leverage CRM tools and strategies to attain competitive advantage
Sawsan Mohammed Shouib Al Khouri
United Arab Emirates University
