Analele Universităţii Constantin Brâncuşi din Târgu Jiu : Seria Economie (Oct 2020)
THE STATE OF ADOPTING CRM SOFTWARE-SOLUTIONS AS PART OF THE ENTERPRISES’ INTERNAL PROCESSES INTEGRATION – A CLUSTER ANALYSIS AT THE LEVEL OF THE EU-MEMBER STATES JUST PRIOR TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Abstract
The past months marked by the COVID-19 pandemic experiences proved to enterprises how important is their digitization, not only for improving their economic performance or accessing new digital markets but mostly for their future existence. The digitalization proved that it is no longer just an option. Managers, employers and employees, or even simple citizens understood that the digital revolution and digital technologies are already changing the interaction, communication, products and services consuming mode, our work, as a necessity. Anyway, in recent years, under a continuous change of market conditions, many organizations, specifically business, abandoned their traditional way of managing by adopting the new emerging Internet technologies and using information technologybased solutions. One of the first steps in transformation must be the usage of integrated software applications and integrated systems that combine the business management activities with digital technology, and whereby the various business processes (internal or external) are integrated into the computer system to achieve their specific business goals. Based on available data from the Eurostat online database, this paper aims to identify the groups of countries, European member states (excepting the United Kingdom), with similar (close) characteristics regarding the use of software solutions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in 2019 by conducting an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis. To classify the 27 countries into homogeneous groups in order to identify countries' disparities based on the clustering variables considered, was applied the hierarchical cluster procedure performed with IBM SPSS. In essence, the aim is to identify the relevant clusters, which assume the proximity (similarity) of countries regarding the CRM software-solutions usage by the enterprises as a part of the internal integration processes of their IT systems.
