SATURNO EN ASPECTO CON NEPTUNO

The findings reported in this research have led to a number of managerial implications for the organizations interested in leveraging their spending on CRM. First, managers should note that the findings of this study are applicable to any other industry. This result is the same as the result of multi-industry research done by Reinartz et al. (2004), which implies that the benefits of CRM are approximately the same across different organizations.

The second main result that managers should consider is that CRM is a multidimensional phenomenon that should be considered in all levels of the firm; therefore, if organizations are going to get the most out of value that can be created by CRM, they should design a suitable organization-wide customer strategy with specific

goals. According to Zablah et al. (2004) and Keramati et al. (2010), not all the customers are interested in specific relationships; therefore, if a firm tries to apply the same relationships as the other ones do, the result can even be a negative rate of customer retention. As a result, since all the companies can not act based on the same customer strategies, using the mentioned strategy is the most important step to have a competitive advantage.

When the customer strategy is designed, managers should commit themselves to it. Indeed this commitment leads to at least two important results. The first and most important one is that managers will provide the technological and human resources properly and at the right time; secondly, when the employees see that their managers are completely committed to the designed customer strategy, they adopt and apply it easier and faster.

Third, as it has been previously mentioned, organizations can develop their customer retention programs of CRM by path-dependent processes. In this research we suggested a path through which firms can develop their capability in customer retention. In addition, based on the theory of production, a certain level of output can be achieved by different combinations of inputs. Therefore, if organizations want to use CRM to improve their rate of customer retention, they should leverage their spending on a proper combination of technological, human, and organizational CRM resources and put them properly in place.

The fourth point is that for designing customer retention programs of CRM, CRM processes are the prerequisite which use all CRM resources (CRM inputs). Therefore, to design effective customer retention programs of CRM, companies should organize specific management and operational CRM processes. When applying both kinds of processes, managers should control the procedure to ensure that they are working as designed.

Fifth, in assigning the CRM resources, technology is the last one to consider. Indeed, organizations should first consider what CRM goals they want to reach, what processes they want to use, and what benefits they are going to gain and in the next step, they can provide the proper technological resources.

The sixth point is that managers should note that among all CRM resources, the human part is the most important one. Indeed, to manage a CRM program and achieve its goals including customer retention, technical and behavioral skills and experience are required. To do so, they need people with the mentioned characteristics; therefore, they should train their available experts; otherwise, they can provide experienced and skilled people by employing them from outside the organization. Besides, by showing the importance of CRM programs to these skilled employees, designing incentive systems to motivate them, and defining the roles of each one clearly, managers can implement and control the CRM processes more efficiently.

Seventh, the calculated means in tables 5.8 to 5.12 show that from the respondents' point of view, all the four considered banks have applied all the research variables (CRM resources, CRM processes, customer retention programs of CRM, and customer retention) more than the average scale (4). However, the performance of private banks (Pasargad and Saman) is better than governmental ones (Maskan and Refah) for all of these variables. Therefore, a very important point that managers of governmental banks should notice is that since they have not been successful in applying CRM resources, CRM processes and programs as much as private banks, they should improve these variables to have a better performance in customer retention and therefore a better competitiveness. Also, we realized that between the two private banks, the performance of Pasargad bank is a little weaker than Saman bank in applying CRM resources, but for the rest of the research variables, the situation of Pasargad bank is better than the other three banks and has the highest rate of customer retention.

The last point is that the results of Pearson correlation suggest that there is a positive and significant correlation between each of the customer retention programs of CRM and customer retention. However, these results also reveal that among the four customer retention programs of CRM, the most significant correlation is between customer service and customer retention and the lowest belongs to customization and customer retention. Therefore, we can conclude that to have a higher rate of customer retention, it is recommended that among the studied customer retention programs of CRM in this research, banks should invest and focus more on customer service to improve and develop it.