Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

1. IntroductionThe meteoric rise of Africa‘s mobile cellular subscriptions has exceeded forecasts made by industry experts (ITU,2009). In September 2011, Africa became the second most connected region in the world in terms of mobilesubscriptions count, reaching more than half a billion number of mobile telephone users on the African continent(Rao, 2011). It is forecast that an additional 224 million mobile users will be added to this base over the next fiveyears (Rao, 2011). Whilst the penetration rate in the rest of the African continent remains low, averaging at 41%(Otto, 2011), in South Africa it reached the 100% penetration barrier during the third quarter of the year 2008(Cellular news, 2009). This high penetration rate in South Africa is telling of the state of its mobile telephonyindustry, which is, without doubt, saturated. Today, these South African mobile telephony companies, regardless oftheir size, have no option but to re-engineer their customer offerings to remain competitive.In this study, we investigate the CRM journey of a mobile telephony operator in South Africa by (1) examining thecommon success factors of CRM implementation, and (2) identifying those contingency factors that impact onsuccessful CRM in emerging markets, and in South Africa, specifically.The paper is organized as follows: a literature review on CRM success factors, including both an industrialized andemerging markets perspective; then follows a conceptual framework and thirdly, the research method. Subsequentsections include data analysis and results, conclusions, limitations and areas of future research as well as managerial,theoretical and societal implications.2. Literature review2.1 CRM and the emerging market contextThe available literature on CRM presents numerous definitions of what CRM is, thereby prompting Winer (2001:91)to assert that ―CRM means different things to different people‖. This plethora of definitions has created someconfusion on its true meaning (Pedron and Saccol, 2009; Jayachadran, Sharma, Kaufman and Ramon, 2008; Troy,2008; Iriana and Buttle, 2006; Meyer and Kolbe, 2005). For example, CRM has been referred to as technology(Nguyen, Sheriff and Newby, 2007; Hart, 2006), a business strategy (Schierholz et al., 2007; Buttle, 2009; Kumar