The mediating effect of superior CRM capability: The impact of organizational wide implementation and training orientation on profitability - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 128

2 REVIEW OF PREVIOUS RESEARCHES mation that support for CRM employees to under-

stand customer need and behavior trend. Bohling
et al. (2006) suggested CRM organization-wide
could increase competitive advantage for employ-
ees because it involves the interactions among tech-
nology, people, their values and work practices in
organization. Thus, we developed H2 as follow:
H2: CRM profitability is positively related to CRM
organization-wide. This effect is partly mediated by
CRM superior capability

2.1 Customer Relationship Management
Some researchers view CRM as technology, while
others see it as data storage and analysis or cus-
tomer-centric strategy (Bodenberg, 2001). Payne
and Frow (2005) pointed that “CRM should be
positioned in the broad strategic context because
“CRM is not simply an IT solution that is used
to acquire and grow a customer base; it involves a
profound synthesis of strategic vision; a corporate
understanding of the nature of customer value in
a multichannel environment; the utilization of the
appropriate information management and CRM
application; and high-quality operations, fulfill-
ment, and service”. CRM strategy consists of the
organizational level CRM performances, goals, pol-
icies, standard and best practices across department
to identify customer behavior trends. CRM helps
corporation to increase customer retention, cus-
tomer loyalty and achieving higher customer profit-
ability by training employees in keeping relationship
with customer (Kim, et al., 2003). Hence, providing
CRM capabilities to employees is very important
that leads to achieving organization performance.

2.4 CRM training orientation
CRM training orientation helps all kinds of employ-
ees to understand and serve customers better. Facil-
itating skills and capabilities will deliver excellent
experience in achieving customer value and com-
pany alike (Baran, Galka & Strunk, 2008; Buttle,
2009). CRM training orientation helps employees
to know how to get things done and how to keep a
sustainable relationship with customer in achieving
CRM profitability. The more training employees
had the better skills and capabilities they could use
to provide high quality of products and services to
customers. It will lead to increase customer satisfac-
tion via job performance. Employees will be easy
to work with CRM application and convert cus-
tomer data into knowledge by training. Kim (2008)
showed that training programs promote employees'
specialized skills that are necessary to interact with
customers. Therefore, we developed H3 as follows:
H3: CRM profitability is positively related to CRM
training orientation. This effect is partly mediated
by superior CRM capability .

2.2 Superior CRM capability and CRM
profitability
Morgan, Slotegraaf, and Vorhies (2009) stated
that CRM capability consists of a firm's skill and
accumulated knowledge to establish, maintain and
enhance sustainable relationships with valuable
customers. CRM can help attract new customers
and enhance the occupancy rate in hotel industry
(Roh, Ahn & Han, 2005). CRM will increase the
customer satisfaction and loyalty by understand-
ing their needs. Superior CRM capability could be
measured in the activities and processes involving
technical, human, and business related capabilities
(Barney, 1991; Marchand, Kettinger & Rollins,
2000). Hence the first hypothesis is postulated.
H1: Superior CRM capability is positively related
to CRM profitability.

3 METHODOLOGY

3.1 Sample and procedure
Data was collected in Vietnamese hotel industry.
There are 314 usable questionnaires collected from
339 hotels. The questionnaires were handed out by
sending through email and by interviewing CRM
first-line employees who work in the divisions of
marketing, sales, call centers, front office, and res-
ervations. The results showed that 54.5 percent of
respondents are female and 30.2 percent of the
respondents are from the medium firm size with the
total of employees around 51 to 100 employees.

2.3 CRM organization-wide
CRM organization-wide consists of many inter-
related sub-process that can be subdivided into a
collection of activities to make CRM more com-
prehensive and successful (Payne & Frow, 2005).
Some researchers showed that a fully and successful
implementation of CRM with a customer centric
cross-functional will have positive effect on customer
retention and organization's profitability (Chen &
Popovich, 2003; Yim, Anderson & Swaminathan,
2004). Sharing information across the organization
will integrate fragmented silos of customer infor-

3.2 Measures
To measure CRM training orientation, we used a
seven point Likert scale recommended by Kim (2008)
with 10 items, while the scale of CRM organization-
wide was adopted from Jayachandran, Sharma,
Kaufman, and Raman (2005) study. The scales for