Abstract:
Small Medium Enterprise (SME) sector plays prominent role to the development of Sri
Lanka, and they have been facing huge problem and challenges in this competitive and
crisis environment. Previous researchers have conducted research on e-CRM
application for large firms and proved the e-CRM’s significant for large firms. Still e
CRM application is debatable in developing countries. The purpose of this research is
to find out the ubiquitous e-CRM application for the success of Sri Lankan MSMEs,
especially the factors of e-CRM in SME sector. Researcher applied mixed method in
this research and respondents are the owners or managers of SMEs. Four focus group
discussion and ten interviews were conducted for the qualitative research and snowball
sampling techniques was applied to select the respondents for the quantitative method.
The coding and thematic analysis were conducted to find out the themes of e-CRM of
SMEs. From the qualitative analysis, fifteen themes were identified and they were come
under the three dimensions. For the quantitative research, questionnaire was
developed with 36 questions. The exploratory factor analysis was conducted to find out
the factors of e-CRM of SMEs. Four dimensions were identified from the exploratory
factor analysis. Factor 1 is named as E-CRM in Marketing, factor 2 is denoted as E
CRM implementation, factor 3 is called as Strategic integration and factor 4 is referred
as Technology-based CRM. The application of four dimensions of e-CRM enable the
SMEs to keep existing customers and attract the new customer.
