Reflective on Customer Relationship Management Strategy - Case Study Example

Reflective on Customer Relationship Management Strategy Executive Summary In today's competitive market environment, effective brand management becomes imperative in enhancing market share and to attain sustainable growth. To compete with the market leaders and gain competitive edge, companies all over the world are using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as an effective tool. In such a scenario, the most difficult challenge for a company is to retain their loyal customers and also to attract brand switchers. According to the online survey conducted by a New York-based consulting service firm, 67% of respondents reported switching companies because of poor customer service (Beal, 2008). At this juncture, the present essay is prepared to examine and reflect the CRM Implementation project done as par of the Business System Integration course. The main purpose of the report is to reflect what al things have been done in the project to come out with an effective CRM Plan for Aluxtel Company. Specifically, the report attempts to narrate the background of the necessity of a CRM plan from the company’s perspective and objectives for which CRM plan was developed. Further more, I have tried to portray the challenges that the company has faced and the prescribed the ways to overcome those challenges. The essay is concluded with my experience of doing an informative project and the lessons I learned out of my experience. Now, I feel that if I had been given little more time for completion, the project would have been much better. Project Profile The CRM project has bee done as a part of my curriculum in the Business System Integration Course work for the week 5-10. The project has been completed in association with other students who have been selected for the group to which I belong. The assigned project was to prepare a CRM plan and Implementation strategy for a big company- Aluxtel Company, which has been in telecom and entertainment industry for last several years. The main aim of the project was to provide a practical exposure to the students as to how integrating business system works and how effectively CRM strategies can be framed and implemented. Apart from that it attempts to equip the students with the knowledge and experience about teamwork and communication skills. The work start with situation analysis of the company to know about where it stands and where it wants to reach and what is the difference between the two states. After analysing the background of the company, the next task was to propose a CRM plan and implementation strategy so that the company can overcome its present problems and challenges. The work has touched almost all functional areas, which have a bearing upon the CRM plan and its implementation. The project was concluded with suggestions and recommendations to further improve the CRM plan effectiveness and reach the goal of customer loyalty and sustainability. All efforts have been put to make the work most effective and contributing prosperity to the company. Aims and Objectives 1. To enhance the knowledge about Business System Integration To get acquaintance with how to formulate and implement CRM strategies Apply CRM concepts to real-life business situations 2. To realise the effectiveness of team work in contrast to working in isolation and develop team working skill The group emphasised on team work and every decisions were taken in consultation with all team members Held meetings regularly to discuss difficulties, solutions, plans and processes 3. To undertake the assignment in a professional manner and complete it successfully Devote enough time to come up with the best CRM strategy appropriate for the company Extensive research of books, articles and other secondary sources on CRM implementation. Body of the Project This section of the report deals with what the researchers have done in planning and implementing the CRM Strategy. The main focused areas of the project were bifurcated into three - making a brochure; responding to Response for Proposal (RFP); and issuing Best and Final Offer (BAFO). Each of these is briefly described as below: 1. Making the brochure There are two steps involved in making a brochure, namely developing the content and designing the brochure. Contents were developed by a group including me and the brochure was designed by the group who are experts in Adobe Photoshop application software. To start with the content development task, a number of brainstorming sessions were held that generated so many ideas and opinions. The sessions were held mainly on the following topics for which contents were needed. Background of the company A professional and touching Business Logo Mission Statement Core Competencies Team ethos Before finalising the brochure, the team had one more meeting to ensure the support and consent of all to keep the team members enthusiastic and to keep the group from problems. 2. Responding to RFP (Response For Proposal) For the completion of this part of the project, we had to decide two areas. First, we had to have a consensus on CRM implementation approach and secondly, on CRM implementation process. The implementation approach on which we had agreed upon was People, Process and Technology (PPT), which was found to be the most appropriate for the company. This approach is the most popular one and many empirical studies have supported it. Based on the empirical study by Mendoza et al. (2006), successful implementation CRM strategy comprised of three key aspects: people, process, and technology. People It is a known well known fact that human capital is a vital element of organisations. In implementing a CRM strategy, the people in an organisation must be able to cope up with the changes necessarily to be initiated as a part of implementation. But, in most cases, people adaptation becomes an utter failure due to their inability to adjust with the changes. This results in negative results out of CRM strategy, which was intended to bring opposite results. Conventionally, companies have been focusing on product-oriented approach for marketing their goods and services. But, modern competitive market calls for a shift from the conventional approach to the modern customer-oriented approach, which necessitates a ground level change in the attitude from the part of the employees and organisation. For this, the involvement of top management team is important since they can convince their subordinates of the benefits of CRM strategy and ask for more cooperation from them. Nevertheless, Aluxtel senior executive s have not responded positively to any initiatives for change in corporate culture and without organisation’s support, the success of CRM strategy will remain an unreachable aim. We strongly recommended for an urgent meeting with top officials of the organisation to explain and convince them of the benefits of CRM strategy. If they have still confusion over the success of the strategy, they must be provided an opportunity to suggest their own views and ideas to improve the plan. This will ensure an active involvement from the part of senor officials because more they are satisfied with the project, the more they commit themselves to and participate in the project for the successful completion. Process Fundamentally, CRM strategy aims to develop and maintain a strong relationship with customers. Therefore, analysing the processes/stages which entail the interaction with customers is essential. Three main processes which involve customer interaction include marketing, sales, and services. Marketing processes focus on estimating the customers’ buying behaviors and understanding customers’ needs. Sales involve the actual delivery of goods and/or services with the support of the promotion activities. Therefore, sales people always have the opportunity to interact with the customers who are informed and inspired by the marketing team. This demands constant sharing of information on market and customers among people involved in these processes. A collaborative and cooperative environment is a prerequisite for the successful working of CRM strategy. After the project implementation, all of the team members firmly believe that the company should deploy a collaborative information sharing system so that the relevant information can be shared in common among the people involved. The company can think, for example, of a web board information sharing system within the organization. The people involved in the processes of marketing, selling and services can create a sub-website for each department where they belong to and can update the system as soon as new information comes in. The web board must be designed in such a manner that all others concerned with the processes get information without any difficulty. Nevertheless, for security purposes, each department should have different authorization level to access the information. For example, sales department can access sub-web board of marketing department as well as production department but not accounting or finance department since such information are not highly important for their work. Technology Technology is meant to facilitate the implementation of CRM strategy. The company already had the information on customers, but this bulk of information was not integrated and collaborative. They have been stored in different systems and no one has the accessibility to free information about the processes/departments in which he is not a member. Therefore, it is imperative to integrate the diverse applications and create a collaborative information processing system that ensures smooth flow of information across different processes and departments. 3. Issuing BAFO (Best and Final Offer) As mentioned already, all the activities were decided in consultation with and performed by the team. The issuance of BAFO was a big task and called for consuming much time for discussing each and every aspect of BAFO. Therefore, it was decided to break the job into small tasks and each task was assigned to each member in the group so that all tasks could be performed successfully within the time allotted. My role in this regard was to frame plans for overcoming challenges and conducting stakeholder analysis. Following is the list of issues that Aluxtel has faced in this connection. Sales department Lack of communication between Sales, Marketing and Product Development Call centre staff are overrun Increasing call waiting times Forum was rejected by senior staff of other departments due to lack of backing Marketing department Failure of other departments to keep the momentum Information is filtered slowly due to dynamic market Proposal of the Forum was time consuming due to unnecessary meetings Has become a silo of efficient team workers – unlikely to change Operations department Over 2 million customer records Inconsistent data entries due to acquisition of companies The cost of manual data cleansing The possible shut down of the call centers due to migration Adding new customers to the system during the migration Delay in handling can cause even longer call waiting times For successfully overcoming the challenges and implementing the CRM strategy, the challenges have been conveniently divided in the following manner: Organizational culture and knowledge sharing issue Aluxtel consists of 5 major departments which have their own sub-cultures and each sub-knowledge shared their tacit knowledge among their groups; consequently, the knowledge cannot easily be transferred to other part of the organization. Knowledge became sticky that is residing in one area (Finnegan and Willcock 2007). No involvement of the senior departmental staff in the stimulation of an integrated corporate culture A collaborative corporate culture is one of the major crucial factors of CRM implementation. Top management needs to take initiative for events and methods which will reinforce and enhance corporate culture. Resistance to change from employees Implementing new CRM strategy has a strong impact on employees since it changes the way they had done things and they may resist complying with the demanded changes. It is a great challenge to adapt their attitudes and behavior to the changes in new working environment. Technical problems Data migration is one of the main problems in implementing CRM system. Since Aluxtel has more than 2 million active customer records and the data is not format in the same pattern. Data location and it transfer to the new system took much time and hence it may affect the company’s operations. Also the data transferring involves huge cost as majority of the data were not in required format and sequence. In the stakeholder analysis part, two main groups have been identified namely, Primary Stakeholder and Secondary Stakeholder. Primary stakeholders are those who are directly involved in the implementation of CRM strategy whereas secondary stakeholders are those who have a more indirect involvement in the deployment of CRM strategy. These groups have been further bifurcated into the following: Primary Stakeholders Top management Top management consists of CEO, CIO, COO, Sales director, Marketing director, Business development director. Marketing department Sales department Accounting department Product Development Customer support department Sale representatives Customers External customers Government – Ofcom Bank Community After assignment of task for each member in the team, meetings were held for three days consecutively to have a consensus on the content of BAFO. We discussed points like areas where we can modify in the report and asked for recommendations from team members. Much efforts have been put for long hours for the implementation CRM project and finally BAFO was proposed for Aluxtel. Challenges Time constraint The availability of time is the most important constraint of the project. Learning both the theory of implementation CRM strategy and applying to real life system integration exercise were quite difficult within a short span of one month. Because in between the project, I had other projects as well to complete and commitment to extra-curricular activities. Solution Time management is the only one effective tool to overcome this challenge. To manage time, I prioritized all my tasks, deciding which task is the most important and needs to be completed first and how long it will take to complete each task. Then, I developed a timetable for classes, meetings, studies, reading, extra-curricular activities and indeed for pleasure. This schedule helped me to organize the time effectively, and also kept me informed about deadlines and upcoming tasks. Cultural difference As the group contains people with diverse background, culture, nationalities and educations, there have different working styles which mostly became a topic of debate throughout the project. Solution I treated cultural diversity as a boon to positively help the group and project rather than taking it a bane and cursing each member for their role and tasks. I recognized, understood, appreciated and respected the diversity in work pattern because these differences allowed us to look at the project from different perspectives, creating innovative ideas and multiple inputs which in turn came to be known as our strength later on. Lack of knowledge and information Before taking this project in the area of business systems integration and consultancy module, I had no knowledge about CRM implementation. Thus, it is a big challenge for me to face and learn new concepts and theories to keep me informed about the strategy and its implementation. Solution I spent much time with books, journals, lecture handouts and other sources to get familiar with the CRM related concepts and theories. Of course, this project has enhanced my knowledge level in strategies in general and CRM strategies in particular, which will be of much utility in my life for application in real life business situations. Personally, I believe that business students must be given practical exposure in real life business situations in order to equip them with competencies to meet the demand of future. Areas of Improvement As already stated, the three main areas of functions are designing and developing the brochure, responding to RFP and issuing BAFO. For each stage, feedback were collected which helped me to alter, revise or modify wherever needed. The following areas must be improved as per the feedback. Stage one: Generating the brochure The brochure looks nice and clean but there was too little information. Little more information about Aluxtel should be provided in the brochure so that anybody interested in the company can have sufficient knowledge about company profile. Stage two: Responding to RFP Though we had arranged meeting with the clients, it would not be of any use for the improvement of the proposal. In fact, we should have to use every opportunity to improve and refine the deliverable to the client. Stage three: Issuing BAFO Areas Lacking in BAFO Suggested feature should be provided in the BAFO such as: Multi-channel access Performance monitoring Frequently asked question (FAQ) We used the pilot approach rather than phase approach in the implementation of CRM strategy since we were afraid of the failure of new system but we paid less attention to the cost incurred in planning and implementing CRM strategies. The customers are required to bear the burden of extra cost in connection with running two systems at the same time and it may cause dissatisfaction from our client. Useful Lessons The CRM strategy implementation project was an informative and thought provoking one. The project has enabled me to enhance my knowledge of the realities of business situations and its challenges. At each stage of the project, I was enriched by new information and ideas which inspired me to think to generate more ideas on the project. In the stage of brochure development, about which I had no previous ideas, I got new and innovative knowledge about how to design and develop a brochure. Furthermore, one thing I noticed mostly and particularly is that successful CRM implementation needs not only the perfect blend of technology, but the cooperation of the employees and management of an organization as well. Besides, I learned out of the project that how effectively the duties can be performed and results can be achieved when working as a team in contrast to working in isolation. Also, I noticed that coordination and cooperation are the two pillars of effective team management. Last but not least, I learned to manage time wisely in order to complete all tasks effectively and on time when we have to perform an array of activities. Finally, I achieved my goals and obtained the priceless knowledge which will be of great use for my future careers. References Mendoza, L., Marius, A., Perez, M. and Griman A. 2006, Critical success factors for a customer relationship management strategy, Information and software technology, Vol. 49(8), p. 913-945. Finnegan,D.J. and Willcocks, L.P. 2007, Implementing CRM, From Technology to Knowledge, Chicherster, Wiley, p 40-66. Beal Barney (2008), Customer privacy a serious challenge for marketers, CRM News, search CRM.com, Viewed 19 December 2008, Read More