The shift from a product-oriented business strategy to a customer-focused one has been a major change agent in companies recently. Many companies have invested heavily in technology change enabling a customer-focused relationship marketing strategy. However, there are mixed results as to how successful firms have been in implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. The challenge of managing organizational change has been raised as a potentially important factor affecting the successful outcome of CRM efforts. In order to get more insight into organizational change in the CRM context, we conducted an exploratory single case study, and identified several change events on different observational levels. The research results give support to previous findings that before implementing CRM technologies, a company should first change the organization to become more customer-focused. This again requires the re-engineering of many key customer relationship management processes. Research findings suggest that to succeed, one should first identify existing and concurrent change processes and their related change entities. Then one could evaluate, whether change events-triggered by these processes - might have an effect on one another in a way, which could endanger the successful outcome of the CRM implementation.

Relationship building and management, or what has been labelled as relationship marketing, is a leading approach to marketing (Grönroos, 1994). Practitioners as well as academics suggest that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) provides an actual platform for the operational manifestation of relationship marketing (Plakoyiannaki and Tzokas, 2002; Goodhue, Wixom and Watson, 2002). Recent studies show that the movement to customer relationship management is gaining momentum (Goodhue, Wixom, and Watson, 2002; Morris, Brunyee, and Page, 1998; Romano, 2001), but still, after several years of implementing Information Technology to support relationship marketing, even as many as 55% of all CRM projects do not produce satisfactory results (Rigby, Reichheld and Schefter, 2002; Starkey and Woodcock, 2002). Many studies into the implementation of CRM strategies point out the importance of studying multiple dimensions potentially affecting a successful outcome (Rigby, Reichheld and Schefter, 2002). In their recent survey Goodhue, Wixom, and Watson (2002) found three main dimensions to be important: Applications, infrastructure, and transformation: "Organizational transitions are the most disruptive and difficult CRM targets to reach". According to a survey by CRM Forum (Rigby, Reichheld and Schefter, 2002), the majority of responses pinned the failure of their CRM programs on the lack of adequate change management. There are many practitioner oriented papers published on CRM and on CRM success (Bose, 2002; Bhatia, 2002; Yu, 2001; Peppard, 2000). However, there has been little academic research (Abbott, Stone and Buttle, 2001; Fjermestad and Romano, 2003; Chin et al., 2003) into factors potentially affecting success, and into the managing of change in CRM implementation context. We therefore decided to explore this phenomenon in more detail.