The Adoption of Cloud Computing CRM in SME’s, Southland, New Zealand

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are helping businesses to grow by maintaining healthy relationships with the existing customers and building strong relationships with new customers. However, SaaS-CRM solutions are more desirable options for SME’s as these solutions are less expensive and unsophisticated to implement as compared to on-premise CRM. The main aim of this research is to identify to what extent the SMEs in Southland are aware of SaaS-CRM and what are the factors that affect their decision for adoption. A survey was used to collect data from 35 SME’s operating in the region of Southland, New Zealand. The results showed that only 10% of the SME’s use cloud CRM solutions and different factors such as relative advantage, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, technology readiness, top management support, trust in vendor, and regulatory support affect their cloud CRM adoption decisions.