CRM Applications
Read Kalakota pp 169-202
What is CRM
 CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
is a long term, customer-centric business
strategy whose goal is to maximize
profitability through customer loyalty.
Why bother with CRM software?
 New Customer demands for more self-
service
 High cost of presales (the cost of doing
business)
 High cost of order errors
 Increasing competition (the Internet has a
long reach)
 Complexity of products (repair or just
replace)
 Cheap & powerful CRM software

Growth of “Open Source” free software
E-business Application Architecture
Customer Relationship Management –
some statistics
 It costs six times more to sell to a new customer than
to an existing one
 A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten
people about their experience
 A company can boost its profits by 85% by increasing
its annual customer retention by only 5%
 The odds of selling a product to a new customer are
15%; an existing customer 50%
CRM Cycle
 Acquire New Customers
 Enhance profitability of new customers
 Retain profitable customers for life
Retain customers
Acquire new customers
e.g.,
• differentiation
• innovation
e.g.,
• listening
• adaptability
• new products
• customer service
• loyalty program
Increase customer profitability and retain for life
e.g.,
• bundling
• cross-selling, up-selling
• maximizing high-value /low-cost customers
CRM: Three Phases
1. Acquiring new customers
 Marketing
 Email, snail mail
 Company Website
 Online catalogue
 Intelligent agents
 Website data capture/ analysis
 Analyze traffic on your Web site
 Log files
 Web bugs
 Cookies to track preferences
Not as
popular as
they used to
be.
CRM: Three Phases
2. Enhancing profitability
 Better understand what existing customers want
 Increase up-sell (do you want cheese on that
burger?) and cross-sell (Do you want fries with
that?) opportunities
 Understand non-profitable customers
 Reduce returns and service requirements
 Sales Force Automation (on-line ordering, laptops,
blackberries, etc. for sales staff)
CRM: Three Phases
3. Retaining profitable customers for life
 Increase customer satisfaction
 Create customer loyalty
 Improve service to existing customers
 Provide more self-service opportunities
 Intelligent agents, chat, email, helpdesk, FAQ
 Give access to online knowledge base
 Ensure priority attention for profitable customers
Product and Customer Strategies
Product-centric
strategies
Customer-centric
strategies
Mission
Reduce
cost,
cycle time
Organization Competition
Environment
Increase
customer
profitabilit
y
CRM: Integration with back-end
applications
Back Office:
Integrate customer
data from:
• Accounts Rec. (A/R)
• Sales History
• Supply Chain
• Staff entered data
(e.g. market research)
• External data
(e.g. credit checks)
•Out sourced surveys
CRM: Integration with front-end
applications
Company View
SalesBase is very user-friendly, with that familiar Windows based feel
All SalesBase features
and functions are
accessible from the
Toolbar and Menu
Navigate between Companies
Activities
Contact Management
Customer Activities
Activities can be viewed in a
list. Overdue Activities are
immediately obvious as they
are listed in red. The list shows
the type of activity.
The activities list enables you
to filter activity types, date or
user
From the activities list you can
quickly complete activities by
right mouse clicking on the
required activity
When any activity is completed
the information is transferred to
the contact or company history
and a new activity is prompted
for
Quotation Management
SalesBase allows you to record your
sales opportunities and develop
quotations
Quotations can be verbal or written
using Word templates
Written quotations produce a
quotation document that can be
revised and gives a full audit trail of
any revisions enabling roll-back at any
stage
SalesBase allows you to filter the
quotations list by Active, Completed
and by User
Full reporting enables you to gain an
accurate picture of success or failure
rates and the reasons why, to help you
produce sales forecasts
Sales Management
Accounts Management
The Accounts tab in SalesBase links to
your accounting package to provide
you with current information about
your customers and suppliers
payment and order status
You can also see information from the
Sales Ledger and the Purchase
Ledger, view live orders and order
history
The Ledger transactions can but
filtered to show All, Open or Closed
transactions
Stock drill down capabilities enable
viewing of Stock
Full user security at all levels
CRM Challenges
 Up-selling and Cross-Selling


Any opportunity to turn a customer interaction
into a sale
The role of CRM: to allow sales people to
better understand their customer’s needs and
to take advantage of sales opportunities the
instant they occur
CRM Challenges (cont)
 Marketing and fulfillment
- Customer requests for product and service
information must be delivered in a timely
manner
* The challenge for CRM: how to deliver product
info tailored to individual needs?
CRM Challenges (cont)
 On line Billing


•
Customers still prefer paper bills and receipts
Some innovative companies (Fido for
example) offer incentives to switch to online
bills
Challenge for CRM: Generate and deliver
customer receipts when sales occur
CRM Challenges (cont)
 Field sales and Services

Customers increasingly demand instant
solutions to their problems
 Challenge for CRM: to enable Field sales
people with access to information that will
enable them to instantly solve customer
problems.
 WAP enabled phones becoming popular
CRM – the next Generation…
1) Integrated customer content
- (web access, phone conversations, fax
etc)
2) Centralized contact information
repository
- one easy accessible database for ALL customer contact details
3) Sales and service integration
- serving the customer BEFORE they make a purchase
CRM – the next Generation…
4) Partner integration
- one point of contact for all customer enquiries/complaints
5) Integrating technologies
- Legacy systems. Telephones systems,
Data warehousing, DSS
Journal Question
Choose a business based in Doha and
discuss how effective it is in dealing with
its customers. How does this business use
technology to maintain customer loyalty?