Customer Relationship Management - Essay Example

Relationship Management Introduction: The Importance Centeredness Businesses need to remember that nowadays, customers are more intelligent, well-informed and therefore more demanding than they ever were before. The Internet gives customers access to more information, and this allows them to educate themselves about products. Therefore, they are intensely aware of what they have come to expect. In order to make sure that businesses of today can be successful, the business needs to make sure it is “customer-centered.” This implies a movement away from the former business focus of “process centered.” This shift means that businesses need to reorganize their focus by implanting a strategy geared toward success factors of process, technology, people, and environment. Management process will need to be examined and reviewed in order to make sure that wonderful and effective customer service is being provided (Jones, 2002). Businesses can gain an edge nowadays if they are able to form management that focuses on good customer relationship skills. This is often referred to as customer relationship management, or CRM. The notion with CRM is to make sure the focus of the organization is the customer (Denton, 1992). Therefore, in order to make the company more customer-centered, it is important to ensure that all employees in the business contribute to the customer in the end (McKean, 1989). Businesses that have been able to use this concept with success bring together the processes of people and technology. Making this happen requires the company to have a dedicated and focused management process that focuses its end goal on the customer. (Jones, 2002). Effective customer relationship management requires much more from the business than paying attention to customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is really just a moderate goal for a business. In order to make customers happy and impressed with the business, they want to feel that the businesses realizes that their individual business is important to the business. In order to do this, the business will need to constantly review their customers’ needs in regards to customer relationship management (Denton, 1992). If this is done correctly, the business can retain its customers, and also build up an excellent customer-centered reputation (Kennedy, 1995). A good example of this type of strategy is Amazon.com, which uses an individual type feature for each customer’s account, suggesting different books or other items that customers might be interested in. This shows that the company is taking the customer’s needs and interests to heart. (Jones, 2002). The purpose of this study is to analyze a business that is moving to become a customer-centered industry. The effectiveness of the business’s changes, as well as the overall data results of the business will be taken into consideration. By analyzing both the business itself and the business’s overall results as it moves into the customer-centered sphere, the researcher plans to demonstrate that a customer-centered focus can improve the success of a business, even in today’s terrible economy. Thus, the businesses sales rates will first be explored prior to the implementation of a customer-centered theory, and then will be compared with sales six months after the customer-centered approach had been implanted. The analysis of these figures, along with observations, surveys, and interviews, will help to demonstrate the effectiveness of the customer-centered approach. Aims and Objectives: Ensuring Proper Focus Effective customer relationship management needs to make sure management is focused on providing satisfaction to its customers. This will mean that management will be expected to review customer needs on a daily basis. Therefore, this type of success has to be planned, and should be a main goal of the organization. (Jones, 2002). This proposal plans to analyze an organization that is attempting to make currently make the change to customer-centeredness in order to see if they can put the proper theories into practice and obtain any type of success. The daily results of the business analysis will be taken into consideration as the research progresses. In order to reach a decision on whether the company is successfully meeting its aims or not, a few items will need to be analyzed on a daily basis. In the customer-centered approach, the impression given off by the company becomes very important, and an important distinguisher of whether or not the customers will actually return. Therefore, the company needs to pay attention to the type of impression they give to the customer when the customer reaches out to them. Since a customer may, at any time, reach out to anyone in the business, everyone within the business structure becomes a possible company representative to the customer (Kasper et al, 1999). Whether they know it or not, each individual employee is an important contributor to the overall success of a company’s customer relationship plans. Businesses should be focus on attaining the best people who can do the best job, and keeping those people on their staff(Deviney & Engleke, 2000). If this does not happen, customer relationship plans will not succeed (James, 2000). If a company is willing to employ the best people, it is demonstrating that it does care about the quality of experience the customer is getting. Furthermore, another important focus for a company is diversity. The diversity of the actual business needs to meet the requirements of the diversity of its customers. If the company can match its customers’ diverse needs, then it will be demonstrating its concern for its customers on an individual basis. (Jones, 2002). When analyzing these companies, the researcher will take a close look at the diversity of the employees in the company, as well as the competency of the employees. The researcher plans on observing customer-employee interactions through the company after the customer-centeredness planning and training has taken place. Interactions will be recorded and notes will be taken. The customer will be analyzing conversations to see if the employees are effectively using the customer-centeredness approach through the organization in order to better help the organization’s success. These individual interactions will help demonstrate whether or not the employees grasp the concept and are, in fact, putting the strategies into effect. Objectives of this study include: Objective 1: Observing the company’s progress as employees are trained to focus on customer-centeredness. Objective 2: Interview customers to gage their opinions on the new customer-centered approach. Objective 3: Interview employees to gage their opinions on the new customer-centered approach. Objective 4: Observe management to ensure that they are properly initiating customer-centeredness trainings for employees. Objective 5: Observe sales statistics both before and after customer-centered theory is implemented in order to see if there is an improvement in sales. Brief Rationale and Theoretical Framework: Technology and Employees When a business decides that it wants to become “customer-centered,” it must move its focus to the technology, the people, and the environment of the business and its overall structure, and how the business interacts with these three concepts. The most important goal of the company should be a care and concern for its customers so that it will be able to attract new customers, and keep old customers (Johnson, 2000). The researcher plans to observe all three of these concepts while also monitoring the change in the company’s structure as it becomes more customer-centered. Observations will take place through recorded interactions as well as the researcher’s own notes. The researcher will then use this feedback to compare the company’s progress with the overall goals of customer-centeredness. How will this company treat those that handle customers well? How is the environment presented for this company’s workers? How successful does the company use technology? All three of these questions will be answered by the researcher by observing the company as these changes are implemented. These observations will further help to see if the customer-centered approach is being effectively implemented by the company. These observations are crucial to the goal of the project, because of the observations prove that the company is not correctly implementing the approach, the results and data compiled by the company for its monthly performing statistics will not adequately reflect on whether or not customer-centeredness truly helped the company. Therefore, the researcher intends to use careful observation in order to ensure that the theories of customer-centeredness are being appropriately applied. Furthermore, the researcher plans to interview customers and employees in order to get their feedback and perspective on the customer-centered approach. Employees will be asked whether or not they feel they have gained sufficient trainings, whether or not they feel that the new approach is successful, and how they feel the company is progressing in response to the new analysis. Customers will be asked about their overall experiences, and whether or not they feel they are interacting in an effective customer-centered environment. Furthermore, both employees and customers will also be surveyed, and these survey scores will be recorded. Methodology: Focus on Employees and Customers In order to assess whether or not the customer-centered approach has been effectively implemented, the researcher plans to first observe management and its implementation of a customer-centered approach. These observations will be recorded and the researcher will also take notes during these exchanges. Once this has been established, the researcher will move onto focusing on employees and customers. The researcher plans to observe employee—customer interactions, record them, and take notes. Besides observation, other concepts will be explored. The researcher plans to interview 25 randomly selected customers, and 25 randomly selected employees. These responses will then be recorded and analyzed by the researcher, so the researcher can see whether or not the company is achieving success. The responses discussed by the employees will be analyzed and the researcher will look for repeated complaints as well as repeated positive comments. The customers and employees will also be surveyed. The researcher will randomly select 100 employees and 100 customers. Survey questions will be presented on a 4 point scale with 4 being the best, and 1 being the worst. These results will then by statistically analyzed in order to provide overall percentage scores in order to assess whether or not the company is improving by implanting a customer-centered approach. Beyond this observation, sales statistics will also be compared. The researcher will analyze the sales statistics for the company prior to the implantation of the customer-centeredness approach. Then, six months after the implementation of customer-centered approach, sales statistics will be analyzed again to see if there is any overall improvement. These improvements will be measured and statistically analyzed. Conclusion Management is a very important part of good customer relationship. If an organization wishes to do this, it needs to organize itself around the concept through successful management. If an organization is going to shift its focus to customer relationship, it will need to make customer relationship the most important aspect of the company. This will contribute to the company’s overall success because if customers feel that they are important and respected, they will stay faithful to the company. The organization, however, may have to re-structure its approach to business. When analyzing this situation, the business needs to remember the critical success factors of environment, process, technology, and people. 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