Enhancing Product Innovation through Strategic Customer Relationship Management: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

Purpose: The linkage between effective customer interactions and innovation is a well-established notion in marketing, emphasizing the importance of leveraging customer feedback in the product development process. Yet, the specific role of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in facilitating product innovation remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how CRM initiatives contribute to the phases of product innovation.
Methodology: Utilizing a refined questionnaire, data were collected from leading corporations in Karachi, with a perfect response rate of 102 out of 102 distributed questionnaires.
Results: Results indicated that not all CRM actions increase the throughput of innovation. Any company's plan to stand out from rivals in the eyes of customers is a long-term collaboration and technology-based CRM.
Implications: This research proposes and explores the dynamics between key CRM activities and the product innovation process's stages. It scrutinizes the impact of CRM practices—information sharing, customer engagement, fostering long-term relationships, and collaborative problem-solving, alongside technology-enabled CRM—on the four critical stages of innovation: initiation, input, throughput, and output. Through a survey-based methodology, the study validates several hypothesized relationships.