Exploring the perceptions of service users towards service provider's dark behaviours based on the customer relationship management practices

While customer relationship management (CRM) has received a significant amount ofattention from academics in the field of management and relationship marketing, it hasbeen studied extremely unilaterally. The sole focus has been placed on the successfulimplementation of CRM and its benefits, while possible CRM strategy failure, itscauses and consequences have been ignored.The failure of CRM begins with firm’s inability to understand and differentiate betweenCRM as a strategy and CRM as a tool that collects, stores and manages data acquiredthrough customer touchpoints. CRM strategy holds a bigger picture where firms doesall of the above using CRM tools, and also constantly create and add value throughlearnings generated from customers data and use those learnings to give value backto the customers, which is known as win-win situation (Nguyen et. al., 2015, p.4).Often, the benefits offered by CRM lures the firms towards gaining bigger slice of thecake that leads them to involves in activities like misusing and exploiting customerdata, hidden charges, exploiting vulnerable segments, neglecting customer privacyfavouring profitable customer segments and so on. These activities lead to decreaseservice users’ trust and raises perceptions of being unfairly treated and exploited.Such unfair practices that hinder buyer-seller relationship, have been recognised asdark sides of CRM. It is therefore crucial for the service providers to track and monitortheir CRM activities to ensure that the trust and transparency element is welladdressed and that no CRM activities pose a risk of misusing and damaging thecustomer relationship.This study has two aims. The first main aim of this research is to understand whethermobile service users in the UK are aware of the unfair and hidden activities that arebeing practiced by their service providers; activities that go beyond the aim ofimplementing customer relationship management, and to identify what dark activitiesare being practiced in the name of CRM. The second aim is to recommend aframework that can be implemented in order to eliminate the identified dark sideactivities through this study and encourage a fairer and transparent CRM activities.This will result in value co-creation and a win-win situation for both the serviceproviders and service users.Providing personalised experiences based on individuals’ needs and one-to-oneservice customisation is the key idea behind CRM, as it creates opportunities for crossselling,upselling and profit maximisation through a long-term relationship. However,service providers need to formulate strategies in such a way that they do not entail thedifferential treatment and favouritism of a certain segment of customers over others.Feelings of inequality and unfair treatment are what lead service users to perceivethese CRM activities as being dark ones.This study identifies that practices such as the favouritism of certain customersegments, unequal behaviour, ignorance about vulnerable customer segments andprice discrepancies between loyal and new customers result in perceptions ofunfairness. This leads to customers opting out of relationships, circulating negativeword of mouth on social media and in online communities or engage in the activitiesthat damages the reputation of the firm. The study will also explore dark activities beingpracticed by the service users. Despite there being such visible detrimentalconsequences, little attention has been paid to understanding this side of CRM; hence,the researcher is exploring this realm of marketing and customer management.This research is carried out in the UK Mobile Network Operator (MNO) industry, andthe data collection was conducted using a mixed methods approach that includedNetnography data observation (qualitative method) and an online survey (quantitativemethod). Qualitative data was collected through the observation of MNOs’ Facebookand Twitter pages, while the online survey was conducted by posting the survey linkon the Facebook pages of each MNO—except for O2, which restricts customers frommaking a post on their Facebook community. Therefore, the researcher posted thesurvey link in O2’s community forum instead.Overall, this study contributes to both theory and practice. The study identified thatthere are several forms of dark side CRM practices prevalent amongst service usersand that not many service users are aware of them. The lack of awareness about andvisibility of such activities often encourages practitioners to continue practicing themand exploiting customers’ trust and relationship with the firm. It also identified thatwhen some service users realise that they are in a disadvantaged position, they oftenretaliate through certain forms of dark behaviours themselves: these include engagingin negative word of mouth, abusing employees, using foul language in public platformsand terminating the relationship entirely.Hence, this study is an effort towards bringing the dark side practices in light so thatthe practitioners and policy makers can manage the CRM practices in the mostethical and fairer way possible. It also calls the service users to be vigilant on theactivities practiced by their service providers as well as to be responsible buyers, byreading terms and conditions, acquiring as much information as possible beforebuying, checking the bills and timely reporting the service providers if any unsolicitedactivity is identified.