Impact of consistency in customer relationship management on E-commerce shopper preferences

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in e-commerce is concerned with retaining the existing customers on a long-term basis, motivating them to come back to shop for more and to talk positively to their peers about the products and services provided. Fourteen items have been identified in a developed questionnaire to measure CRM factors in consistency of customer treatment. They are consistencies of: price-quoting, steps to execute a transaction, design of the shopping Web page, site navigation, promotions offered, indication of in-stock products, product variety, alternative product suggestions, fraud protection, presented guarantees involving the product, fairness of the site, help offered, return policies, and personal information. To determine the validity of the items, 100 e-commerce experts from academia were presented the questionnaire and asked to rate the importance of the individual items. The developed tool had a Cronbach's Alpha internal consistency value of 0.81. A multivariate analysis was conducted to cluster the aspects of consistency in CRM. For this purpose, two factors were identified: Technical and Customer Treatment Factors. The individual Cronbach's Alpha values were 0.84 for Treatment Factor and 0.74 for Technical factor. The analysis indicated that the Technical Factor included the consistencies of shopping steps, site design, and navigation, while the Customer Treatment Factor included the consistencies of promotions, in-stock indication, product variety, fraud protection, presented guarantees, customer fairness, and return policies. Based on the analysis, 10 guidelines for Consistency in CRM were produced. The guidelines can be applied to Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce sites as part of their CRM policy.