Customer Relationship Management

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) cluster of excellence brings together researchers seeking to develop business strategies that integrate internal processes and functions and external networks, thus creating and delivering value to targeted customers at a profit. Its research outputs allow organisations to identify, acquire and retain customers by enabling the businesses to manage and coordinate customer interactions across multiple channels, departments, lines of business and locations.

CRM strategy thus helps organisations maximise the value of every customer interaction and drive superior corporate performance. Researchers in this cluster have varied backgrounds in fields such as marketing, psychology, information systems, management, sales, etc.

The CRM cluster is organised along the following areas:

  • Business Intelligence: Companies that effectively manage their customer base use business intelligence and data mining techniques in order to identify, satisfy and retain profitable customers, and then to identify and optimise profitable product categories, which allows the companies to enjoy good business results.
  • Consumer Behaviour: The Consumer Behaviour area seeks to help companies develop a better understanding of customer requirements and expectations.
  • Relationship Marketing: A relationship is composed of a series of interactive episodes between two or more parties. As relationships deepen over time, trust and commitment between the parties is likely to grow and revenue and profit streams from customers will become more secure.
  • Marketing Performance Efficiency: Companies need to assess the performance of loyalty programmes in terms of conventional measures of marketing performance (e.g. satisfaction, image, repurchase behaviour) that measure financial performance (e.g. lifetime customer value, ROI)
  • Negotiation Strategies and Sales Management: Relationship marketing is crucial in relations between firms because good sales coaching in terms of service delivery and knowledge of negotiation strategies are key components for companies.

Performance of Organisations

The excellence cluster in the Performance of Organisations brings together IÉSEG researchers from different disciplines to study the mechanisms and measurement methods of organisational performance. Researchers involved in this cluster come from the management (strategy, operations management, MIS, knowledge management, marketing, negotiation and accounting) and economic disciplines.

The strengths and originality of this cluster can be illustrated as follows:

  • The excellence cluster deals with performance issues in a comprehensive way, from the study of the theoretical framework of competitive advantages in strategy and innovation mechanisms to the measure of performance in productive structures (estimation of production frontiers) and operations (operations management, operational research).
  • The cluster’s researchers use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods, and the approach to performance is multidisciplinary. Collaboration between management specialists and economists has always been one of IÉSEG’s strengths, and is a distinctive feature of the School.

The main research activities conducted in this cluster are structured in the following way:

  • Performance Mechanisms: This area includes strategy, business models, knowledge management and impact of HRM on performance.
  • Performance Measure: This set of activities includes research on microeconomics, accountancy and audit control.
  • Performance of Operations: This area includes research on operations and operations management.