CRM Strategy for Charm City Mortgage - Term Paper Example

Charm mortgage case study The need for a relationship management (CRM) system. The introduction and the use relations management (CRM) is paramount to the success of every business especially in the current competitive business environment. Basically, a CRM provides a means through which an organization can manage its interactions with its customers. Customers communicate and interact with organizations through various channels and the purpose of CRM is to manage these interactions. CRM involves the use of technology to organize, synchronise and automate business processes mainly customer service, sales activities marketing and technical support. Effective CRM solutions will be able to develop synergy among the many business processes involved in customer relationships. Through the use of CRM, an organization will be able maintain its current pool of customers, attract and win new customers an entice former customers back into their business. A CRM system therefore becomes an important tool for achieving a good level of customer loyalty and customer retention. CRM is not a single product nor set of software applications. Instead, it is platform or a technological foundation for various related services. The core components of CRM that are central to any CRM initiative are effective customer segmentation, well-defined business processes, integrated multichannel strategy, the right sets of skill and mindsets and the right technology (ORACLE 5). When these components are thoroughly re-groped, they give four core components that are central to a typical CRM structure. These are marketing management, customer support and sales support. For businesses that have embraced a higher technological support for their business processes such as e-business, e-business infrastructure modules becomes a forth core component in their CRM structure. These above-mentioned key components comprise the core functions directly supporting e-commerce staff, customer service, sales and marketing. There are several ways in which the core components of CRM can be used within Charm City Mortgage to improve customer experience. According to ORACLE (5), the core components of CRM generate improvements to decision-making in all the three major stages of customer relationships. These are customer acquisition, development and retention. Charm City Mortgage can segment/divide its market into distinct groups of customers sharing the same characteristics. Effective customer segmentation will allow Charm City Mortgage to understand which group of customers are the most profitable. This segmentation will enable the organization to develop a customer profile indicating their characteristics like preferences, lifestyles, offers that appeal to them, products they value, what they have spent and are willing to spent in the near future among other critical information. The organization will then be able to identify products that are more attractive to this group of customers to enhance their satisfaction. In other words, Charm City Mortgage will be able to provide service to, market to, and sell to this group of customers more effectively. The result of this is increased sales leading to increased profitability. For its CRM strategy to be successful, Charm City Mortgage should embrace the integrated multichannel strategy. The company should offer its customers many ways of interacting with the company. This is because companies today can no longer compete effectively by using only one channel of interaction with their customers. However, an exclusive use of technology supported channels should be avoided to avoid frustrating customers who do not have a good experience with such channels. ORACLE (6) advices that these channels should be those that align the correct products to the correct channels, balances channel cost and customer needs and enhances the customer experience. The company could therefore a have a variety of channels like mail, e-mails, mail chats and telephone support. Charm City Mortgage should develop a well-defined business processes as a core component of its CRM. Automating an insufficiently-defined business process will only serve quicken the attainment of poor results. However, a well-defined business processes will enable Charm City Mortgage to concentrate on redesigning customer-facing processes depending on the needs and the perspectives of the customer (ORACLE 9). The result of this will be increased customer satisfaction because of products that satisfy customer needs and preferences. Charm City Mortgage should be able to develop the right skill sets and mindsets. It should be noted that a CRM strategy requires the various departments a company to work together and more closely. This changes the dynamics of interacts among people and how a company makes decisions. Whereas CRM facilitates collaborative decision-making, it can also create tension in organizations that are fragmented because in most cases, data ownership is a proprietary attitude among members of an organization’s branches. ORACLE (10) explains that managing change is very important when implementing a CRM strategy and this entails the realigning of skill sets and mindsets. The company will integrate this change in attitude and skill to facilitate a better user adoption. The right technology is the final core component of a CRM strategy. Through this component, Charm City Mortgage will be able to track all interactions of its customer regardless of how, where or when the interaction occurs. The company should develop the right technology that will satisfy the following criteria; multichannel support, flexible deployable options, industry-specific functionality, scalability and global support and support for all devices (ORACLE 10). How Charm City Mortgage might use their Internet Platform and/or Social Networking to market the company or keep contact with its customers. Through social networks, friends are able to share information on their interests and activities across economical, social, political and geographic boundaries. Charm City Mortgage should therefore create blogs in its internet platform that will promote more communications between peers and enable them share information on their experience with the company. The company can also use social network tools like facebook and twitter to disseminate a lot of relevant information about itself to its customers. This will be efficient in achieving a rapid spread of opinions but the product offered by the company among customers and their friends. This will boost online collaboration between the company and its customers and between its customers and their peers, and avail more customer created content to the company which could be used to make improvements. The company should also utilize the internet a means through which the company interacts and does business with its current and potential customers. It should develop and offer applications and services to catch up with changing information society. A reporting strategy that would help Charm City Mortgage monitor their key business drivers. One of the best strategies for performing reporting and analysis of CRM is data warehouse. Data warehouse is basically a database used for reporting and analysis. Data stored here is uploaded from the operational systems and may pass through the operational data store for more operations before it is used in the data warehouse (DW) for reporting. Kimball and Margy (25) explain that a DW mainly focuses on storing data and before this the data is availed to managers and other business professionals for decision support, analytical processing, data mining and market research, the main data source is cleaned, transformed and catalogued. A DW provides detailed information in that it maintains a copy of information obtained from the source transaction systems. This includes information on the business processes that drive profitability/ business drivers. Data mart could also act as a good reporting and analysis tool. However, it does not provide detailed information as compared to DW. In fact DWs can be subdivided into data marts and this means that data marts only function in storing subsets of data from a DW. This implies that it is not powerful in providing an extensive and strong reporting and analysis database. DW has some advantages that makes it more preferable to other reporting/analysis systems. These include consistent presentation of information, improves data quality by providing consistent descriptions and codes, flagging or even fixing bad data and provides a uniform data model for all data irrespective of their sources. it also restructures the data so that it becomes more meaningful to the business users, and so that it can offer excellent query performance without impacting the operational systems even in complex analytic queries. In addition to the above advantages, a DW integrates data from more than one source systems and this facilitates a central view across the enterprise. This benefit is particularly valuable to Charm City Mortgage because the company operates through braches. As compared to transactional systems, a DW maintains a data history even when the same is not being maintained by the source transaction sources. Most importantly, a DW adds value to the existing operational business applications, mainly CRS systems. Generally, a DW houses the centralized account and customer information generated through the core CRM applications. This important analytics component uncovers the patterns customer interaction and this is useful in enabling a company personalize the experience of its customers. Of the three reporting/analysis systems, that is, data warehouse, data mart and transactional systems, DW and transactional systems are more likely to provide the most benefit to an organization making them powerful decision support systems. These benefits are business intelligence systems, expert systems, decision support systems, data mining and executive support systems. I therefore recommend that to Charm City Mortgage uses a data warehouse to perform an reporting and analysis of its CRM. How to assess the current state of Charm City’s information systems security It is important that Charm City Mortgage assesses the security of its information systems to ensure it is protected from unauthorized access, disruption, modification, perusal, use, recording, disclosure, inspection or destruction. In order to assess the current state of Charm City’s information systems security, I would make an analysis of their exposure. This will give the potential risks to the availability, confidentiality and the integrity of the information systems both from internal and external threats. First, I would assess the method through which users of these systems access them for example through internet connection, wireless network, intranet connection among other ways. More ways of accessing the systems and the use of wireless networks will imply that the systems are not very secure. Although wireless network may provide flexible, convenient and an easy way of accessing the company’s information systems, it also exposes it to external intruders because it transmits information through radio frequencies. I would also access the numbers of users accessing them and the existence of any backend connections and where these systems are connected to. If these backend systems are connected to individual or external computer systems apart from the company systems, then this is a sign that the company’s information systems are not secure. As for internal threats, I would assess the clearance levels, security background assurances, access approvals and need for identification for persons using these systems. If these are at low level/less strict, then the system is less secure and if they are high/strict, then the systems are at secure and at low risks to unauthorized access, use, exposure, modification and destruction. In order to maintain high level of security for its information systems, Charm City Mortgage eliminate the use of wireless networks in accessing information systems and where it is unavoidable, it its system should be highly protected. The company should also limit the number of people accessing some vital information and demand for identification for such authorized persons. The organizations should also reduce or eliminate the connection of its information system to backend systems and ensure that it does not use Verizon’s simple website for its core information systems. Conclusion It is important that Charm City Mortgage purchase a CRM system. This will put the company in a better competitive position by boosting its level of customer support. A good CRM solution will enhance the interaction between the company and its customers and the way in which the company responds to the needs and preferences of its customers. The use of information systems is important in this. However, the communication arena marked by powerful computing devices that are highly interactive and systems that are interconnected across global networks requires that each organization should deeply assess the security of its information systems. This is very vital for Charm City Mortgage given its current state of infrastructure and new business processes. The company should accomplish this quickly by assessing the availability, confidentiality and integrity of these systems. This information will form the basis of actions directed towards protecting them from unauthorized access, disruption, modification, perusal, use, recording, disclosure, inspection or destruction. Like many other 21st century organisations, the company should not miss out on the use of social networking systems and internet platform to market itself and keep contact with its customers. The company should therefore utilize every internet tool to increase communication and interaction between itself and its customers, among its costumers and between its customers and their peers. Works Cited Kimball Ralph and Margy Ross. The Data Warehouse Toolkit. (2nd Ed). New York. John Wiley and Sons. ORACLE SIEBEL. (2006). Why CRM? The Business Case for Customer Relationship Management: An Oracle White Paper. Online: www.oracle.com/us/products/.../051287.pdf. Retrieved on 20th December, 2011. Read More