The CRM imperative – Practice vs theory in the telecommunications industry
Wright L.T., Stone M., and Abbot J.
The main objective of this paper is to examine how businesses were enabled to focus on the customer taking advantage of the Information Technology. Using three case studies based on three different telecommunication companies, authors made an attempt to understand what affects Customer Relationship Management (CRM) when it is actually applied. Two traditionally telephony companies and a new-entrant cable firm applied CRM technologies in order to retain and win costumers in the telephony market but each company dealt with the introduction of its CRM in a different way. Without intentions of providing prescriptions for building CRM, authors identify some key points showing areas where the adoption of CRM could enhance organizational practices such as: market orientation, improvement of collaboration, people management and commitment, knowledge acquisition and management, management and proliferation of data, efficiency and effectiveness, and finally, speedy solutions and profitability. What the case studies have shown was that when companies faced with the dilemma of investing in new technologies, new products etc they could also invest simultaneously in improving their customer relationship skill.
CRM systems: Necessary, but not sufficient. REAP the benefits of customer management
Starkey M., Woodcock N.
Spending on Customer Relationship Management not always benefits the expected for a company. Furthermore investing in CRM sometimes can waste opportunities for a company and destroy economic value. The lack of senior executive ownership and leadership, the unnecessarily complexity in designing CRM, the dysfunctional approaches from the perspective of customer, the lack in knowledge of good customer management techniques, the poor implementations of CRM systems, etc are some of the reasons that authors identified as what makes customer management performance disappointing. Of course, there are examples of effective practices in companies. Authors believe that it is of great importance the investment to be in the ‘right things’ so customer management must include planning for Retention, Efficiency, Acquisition and Penetration. According to measurements in the case studies of this paper such a planning can provide four to one return on investment for well-managed programmes.
Hartline D.M., Maxham G.J., and McKee O.D.
Customer contact employees are responsible for carrying out the customer-oriented strategy of a company to end customers in the form of quality services. In this paper a model has been proposed explaining how a company can disseminate a customer-oriented strategy in order to increase commitment and shared values of its customer contact employees. The proposed model supports that important role in such dissemination plays the organizational structure, the empowerment, the behavior-based employee evaluation, the socialization and the organizational commitment. Authors validate their hypotheses conducting a questionnaire-based research including in their samplings nine hotel chains. Authors’ findings reveal the existence of three “corridors of influence” between customer-oriented strategy and the shared employee value. The first corridor emphasizes the importance of work group socialization and organizational commitment, the second corridor focuses on formalization and behavior-based evaluation whilst the last corridor focuses on the empowerment of costumer contact employees.
Understanding why marketing does not use the corporate data warehouse for CRM applications
Payton C.F., Zahay D.
This paper tries to answer why marketing does not use the corporate data warehouse for customer relationship management implementations. Conducting a series of focus group interviews with functional marketing and information systems managers in one large regional health care payer, authors identify factors that prevent the adoption of corporate data warehouse in the organization. Marketing needs, data quality issues and training were the most important factors according to the findings of their analysis. Authors found that marketing managers have special data needs and these additional data cannot always be found in the data warehouse. Furthermore, the quality of data kept in the data warehouse may not be acceptable by the marketing managers and finally, the data analysis tools of data warehouse may be difficult to use.
A short synthesis
Customer Relationship Management is a process that allows organizations to gather and analyze customer data in an efficient way improving the customer retention. Therefore, it is very important for organizations to invest simultaneously in improving their customer relationship skill while investing in new products or technologies. Unfortunately, a great number of CRM applications are failing and this is due to the fact that the investment made by the companies for such applications is not enough or even worse, is not well targeted and designed. Organizations can use data that can be found in the corporate data warehouses in order to create and sustain their customer relationship management but to have such ability several issues must be resolved. From the other hand, customer-contact employees – which are responsible for translating a customer-oriented strategy into quality service – must be managed in a way seeking in achieving the employees’ desired performance. To this end, organizations need to invest in the ‘right things’ in order to establish a successful customer relationship management.