WEEKLY QUESTIONS FOR CHAPTER NINE- Customer Relationship Mangament

Q1.What is your understanding of CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term for methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an organisation to manage customer relationships in an efficient way (Williams 2010). For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that describe their relationships in detail so that management, salespeople, and the customer could  directly access information, match customer needs with product plans, remind customers of service requirements, know what products a customer had purchased etc (Williams 2010).

 CRM consists of:

• Helping an organisation to enable its marketing department to identify and target customers, manage marketing campaigns and generate quality leads for the sales team (Williams 2010).
• Assisting the organisation to improve sales by optimizing information shared by employees, and streamlining existing processes (Eg. taking orders using mobile devices) (Williams 2010)
• Formulating individual relationships with customers, with the aim of improving customer satisfaction and maximizing profits.(Williams 2010)
• provide better customer service
• improve call center efficency
• cross sell products more efficenctly

For more information about CRM, the following website has several academic articles on the topic: http://www.ceoonline.com/business/customer-relationship-management.shtml

Reference: Eric Williams, Customer Relationship Management, Available: http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/definition/CRM/ Viewed 10 October 2010.

Q2.Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with customers. Whereas Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. The main difference between the two are the direct interaction between the organisation and its customers.

To learn more, look at this video about CRM: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPDiZQ0DNBw

 

Q3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments
Marketing Depts are able to transform by trying to sell one customer as many products as possible rather than trying to sell one product to many customers, using CRM technologies that gather and analyse customer information to create successful marketing campaigns. The book explains that a marketing campaign's success is directly proportional to the organisations ability to gather and analyse teh correct infomrtion. The 3 primary operational CRM technologies that a Marketing Dept can implement to increase customer satisfaction are:

• list generators- which compile customer information from a variety of sources and segment information for different marketing campaigns.
• campaign management- which guides users through marketing campaigns performing campaign definition, planning, scheduling, segmentation and success analysis.
• cross selling and up selling- which is the selling of additional products or services to a customer

Sales Depts take a different approach. Sales Depts had two main reasons to track customer sales information electronically. Firstly, sales representatives were struggling with a massive amount of account information that they were required to track and maintain.Secondly, companies were struggling that much of the information was in their sales representatives heads and not written down. Sales force automation helped address these two problems by automatically tracking all of the steps in the sales process.

The three primary operational CRM technologies a sales Dept can implement to increase customer satisfaction:

• sales management CRM systems- which automate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts.
• contact management CRM systems- which maintains customer contact information and identifys prospective customers for future sales
• opportunity management CRM systems- which target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales.

Q4.How could a sales department use 
operational CRM technologies?
There are 3 primary operational CRM technologies that a customer service Dept can implement to increase customer satisfaction. They include:

• Contact Centre (call center)- which customer service representatives answer the customer's questions and respond to customer's problems. Mainitaining a high level of support is essential to acquiring and retaining customers.
• knowledge management software can help these call centres by putting consistent answers at the customer services represnetatives fingertips.

•  Web Based Self Service- allows customers to use the internet to find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems
• the click to talk button is a feature which allows customers to click on the button to talk to a CSR directly from the website.

• Call Scripting Systems-access organisational databases that track similar issues or questions and automatically generate the details for the CSR who can then relay them to the customer. The system can also provide a list of questions that the CSR can ask the customer to determine the problem and solution. This can help the CSR by answering difficult questions quickly whist presenting a uniform image so that all customers receive consistent information.

For more information see: http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/223364/operational_crm_leveraging_ocrm_technologies.pdf

Q5.Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence (BI) is a category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to help support decision making efforts (Rossetti 2006). BI applications include the activities of decision support systems, query and reporting, online analytical processing, statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining (Rossetti 2006).
Business intelligence applications can be:

• Mission-critical and integral to an enterprise's operations or occasional to meet a special requirement 
• Enterprise-wide or local to one division, department, or project
• Centrally initiated or driven by user demand (Rossetti 2006).

Many organisations find it difficult to understand their strengths/ weaknesses because of the enormous volume of information.

BI allows for the ability to analyse the business more thoughoutly- such as where the business has been, where it is now, and where it will be in the future.

Value: single point of access to information for all users, BI across organisational Depts, and up to the minute information for everyone.

Reference: Luca Rossetti, Business Intelligence, Available: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/business-intelligence Viewed 12 October 2010.

Q6.Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem.

As the business increases its reliance on enterprise systems (ie CRM) then they rapidly accumulate huge amounts of data. Every single interaction is documented and entered into the system for future use and access. In most organisations it would take the account manager days to gain information about a client because there is too much information to go through, such as inventory levels, orders, client history, etc.
To improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools to assist them in making better, more informed decisions. An example of using BI to make informed decisions includes the retail/sales team predicting sales, determining correct inventory levels and distribution schedules and loss prevention. The solution of implementing BI and tools allows business users to receive data for analysis which is reliable, consistent, understandable and easily manipulated.
 

Q7.What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

The aim of data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to classify and predict. One outcome would be that they found a pattern and relationship which would give then business intelligence and information to assist the company in some way. The other option is that no pattern or relationship is found.

To learn more about data mining, see:  http://www.thearling.com/text/dmwhite/dmwhite.htm