A strategy-based process for effectively determining system requirements in eCRM development

Customer relationship management (CRM) is an important concept to maintain competitiveness at e-commerce. Thus, many organizations hastily implement eCRM and fail to achieve its goal. CRM concept consists of a number of compound components on product designs, marketing attributes, and consumer behaviors. This requires different approaches from traditional ones in developing eCRM. Requirements engineering is one of the important steps in software development. Without a well-defined requirements specification, developers do not know how to proceed with requirements analysis. This research proposes a strategy-based process for requirements elicitation. This framework contains three steps: define customer strategies, identify consumer and marketing characteristics, and determine system requirements. Prior literature lacks discussing the important role of customer strategies in eCRM development. Empirical findings reveal that this strategy-based view positively improves the performance of requirements elicitation.