Week 10 Questions

1.What is your understanding of CRM?

CRM stands for customer relations management. This involves the management of relationships between customers and an organisation in order to increase customer loyalty and retention as well as profitability for the company. This basically is the managment of the interaction between the customer and company and the interactions between them. The goal of CRM is to provide the best possbile customer service, cross sell products more effectively, simplify marketing and sales processes, increase new customers and customer revenue and building rapport with customer to ensure customer loyalty.

2.Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational CRM is: This supports the traditional 'front office' of business. It deals with the operations or systems that deal directly with customers. It focuses mainly on simplifying and organizing customer information into databases

Analytical CRM: This supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal with customers directly. This could be collecting data to be analyzed about customers or even feedback; this can help with decision making.

Visit the link to gain further information about operational and analytical CRM

http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/definition/crm.asp

3.Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

Marketing:

1. List generator:This compiles information and data about customers. This information is then segmented and can be used for references in various marketing campaigns.

2. Campaign management systems: This guides users through marketing campaigns. It performs tasks such as campaign definition, planning, segmenting and analysis. This can help with improving marketing campaigns and knowing how effective it is.

3.Cross selling and up selling: Cross selling: this is adding additional products or services to what a customer already has. Up-selling is increasing the value of the sale.

Sales:

1. Sales management CRM systems: This automates each phase of the sales process, helping each sales associate to coordinator all their accounts. e.g. calendars to plan customer meetings, multimedia presentations and document generation. They provide information about performance the the sales cycle.

2. Contact management CRM systems: Keeps records about customer contacts and identifies prospective customers for the business. e.g. caller logs with customer names and previous calls cam be kept on record allowing for workers to know customer needs, what products they own or problems they have had in the past. Businesses can reduce time through this system by familiarising themselves with customers and also it helps them to assign the qualified sales assistant who can best support their needs.

3. Opportunity management CRM system: This targets sales opportunities by finding new customers for sales. These systems can determine customers, competitors and define selling efforts. They can also calculate probability of sales saving time and money for the business.

4.How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

A sales department could use all three operationa CRM technologies within a business. CRM technologies can be used to track sales information electronically and help keep track and maintain customer information. They also allow for the vital information kept in sales assistants heads about customers to be put into databases and kept on file- this helps future employees to know and understand the cutstomer too. They can also use CRM technologies to track customer sales, analyse sales cycles and which sales person is performing the best. These technologies assist with businesses knowing their customers and building rapport and relationships with them

5.Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence is technologies used together to gather, have access to an analyse data and information. The information that is gathered from business intelligence can be beneficial to the company as it provides critical information to support business decisions. Business environments are constantly changing and are fast paced the value of business intelligence is very high.

Business intelligence allows a company to know its customers and stay competitive in the market giving them information about things such as:

- Best and worst customer- this allows them to give more time to customers who will generate sales

- top sakes assistants

- how successful marketing campaigns have been

-what activities are making money and what ones are loosing money.

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

The problem with business intelligence is the fact that businesses are 'data rich, information poor' (Baltzen et al 2010 pp 418). Businesses father masses of data as they implement systems such as CRM however, because there is so much data the company is unable to use it all, therefore wasting valuable assets of the company. A main issues is that it can take a few weeks to sort and pull reports from data and by the time the information is received it is outdated and to process starts again. The challenge faced by most companies is turning their data into useful information. If they are able to achieve this successfully they can see an increase in employe knowledge and therefore an increase in profitability.

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

Data mining is the process of analyzing data to extract information not offered by the raw data alone.

Two common forms of data mining is:

1)Cluster analysis: This is used to divide information into mutually exclusive groups. This puts members of a group as close together as possible ad different groups as far apart as possible.

Outcome of this form of data mining: This segments customer information and allows businesses to identify behavioral traits in customers or sales rates e.g. retail store layout and sales performance.

2)Association detection: This reveals the degree to which variables are related and the nature of and frequency of these relationships in the information.

Outcome of this form of data mining: This allows the business to identify potential problems or market basket analysis which can help identify buying behaviors. This allows for the company to gain information about buying behavior and predict future behaviour. It also allows them to develope effective marketing campaigns.

Both these forms of data mining allow for an increase in sales and profitability. They both also allow for the business to increase their company resources allowing them to understand their customers therefore they are able to target products to particular customers and understand their buying behaviours.

For more information on CRM and how to be successful in the implementation of it watch the following video: