An Investigation into the Effectiveness and Feasibility of Telkom Kenya Ltd in Using Electronic Customer Relationship Management for Competitive Advantage

A research into the area of Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ECRM) particularly focused on investigating their feasibility and effectiveness of Telkom Kenya Ltd (TKL) in using ECRM for competitive advantage. A background of TKL is first outlined. The current practice of service provision to clients is via letters, telephone, or in person and a few of the services provided in the TKL website. Literature on the current and emerging technologies and applications for ECRM is reviewed, and shows that organizations are at varying stages of providing ECRM, ranging from information on websites to fully interactive services. Key challenges to ECRM include internal organizational issues, political and vested interests, information skills development, costs, management involvement, security.

The details of the research survey conducted to obtain views of staff in the service departments on the feasibility and effectiveness of ECRM for competitive advantage is described. The survey was carried out by using structured questionnaire, resulting to a response rate of 56%. The derived conclusion was that ECRM was feasible for some services and not all. The efficiency of the provision of services was seen to improve with the implementation of ECRM thus retention of customers and increase of revenue. The majority of the departments had targets of 5 years to achieve ECRM in their service provision. The departments that utilized IT and ECRM had a more positive outlook on implementation of ECRM to give competitive advantage the other departments that had lesser involvement with the client and IT in their daily tasks had negative view of ECRM. The technology and the advancement of it combined with the Government commitment has been an encouraging factor in TKL exploiting ECRM. An ECRM ‘’model’’ is developed as recommendation from the findings of the research. TKL needs to commit to use ECRM and enforce it in every department to increase efficiency in customer care and work directly with promoters of ECRM to achieve organizational targets of ECRM in TKL.