THE EXPLORATION OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFs)...
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THE EXPLORATION OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFs) IN IMPLEMENTING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM) SYSTEMS A study submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Information Management at THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD by MANRONG ZHU September 2006
Transcript of THE EXPLORATION OF CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFs)...
THE EXPLORATION OF CRITICAL SUCCESS
FACTORS (CSFs) IN IMPLEMENTING
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
(CRM) SYSTEMS
A study submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Science in Information Management
at
THE UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD
by
MANRONG ZHU
September 2006
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Acknowledgement
With the finish of the dissertation, I would like to thank all the people that
have helped and assisted me during the learning period in the University of
Sheffield.
I would like to thank my dissertation supervisor Dr. Miguel Baptista
Nunes who always treats me very patiently and friendly, gives me great helps,
guidance and encourages in the writing of the dissertation. I also want to thank
research student Salim who gives me heartful helps by providing me useful
writing materials.
I would also like to thank my personal tutor Dr. Paul Clough who has
always been extremely supportive and friendly, who always listens to my
problems attentively, and helps to solve them as best as he can.
My sincere thanks also go to my families, my friends and my boyfriend,
who always comfort me and help me without reluctance when I am in trouble.
Half of my work should belong to them.
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Abstract
With the development of marketing environment, customers are becoming
valuable resources for many companies and organizations. The business
processes and technologies of Customer relationship management (CRM) are
therefore rising rapidly in recent years since 1990s. Like other business
systems, CRM has evidently improved company’s revenues and reduced the
costs. Unlike the other matured systems, CRM is still quite ‘young’, even its
concept is debatable. In order to make contributes to the development of such a
young system, this research aims at identifying the critical success factors (CSFs)
in implementing CRM systems in organisations and companies.
By conducting an in-depth review on a wide range of CRM literatures, the
nature of CRM was defined as a strategy for the company, rather than a simple
computer-based system. The characteristics of CRM are identified as
customer-centric focus, holistic approach and technology empowerment. In
developing CRM model, the researcher chose to divide it in three functional
modules, marketing, sales, and customer service. The main methodology
adopted in the research was an inductive approach, which was to build up
theories from observation of data. Data selected in the research were the reports
of CRM case studies that were conducted by previous researchers. It means
there was no interviews or questionnaires involved; it was conducted through
surveying literatures and documents. Eight cases were finally chosen. They
were analysed against the CRM model established in literature review and
methodology design.
Nine CSFs in implementing CRM systems were finally identified. They
were categorised in marketing, sales, and customer service. Marketing CSFs
emphasise CRM’s analytical functions. Sales CSFs focus more on sales activity
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management and knowledge support for field sales. Customer service CSFs
range from the information access, customer feedback and complaints
management, to channel optimisation. From the result, it can be seen that
customer service CSFs play main roles in the success of CRM.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgement ................................................................................................1 Abstract.................................................................................................................2 Table of Contents..................................................................................................4 Table of Figures ....................................................................................................6 Chapter 1 Introduction........................................................................................7
1.1 Background, motivation and aim ..........................................................7 1.2 Research question and objectives ..........................................................9 1.3 Research methodology ..........................................................................10 1.4 Structure of the dissertation.................................................................10
Chapter 2 Literature Review ............................................................................ 11 2.1 Overview ................................................................................................ 11 2.2 What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?.....................13 2.3 CRM, CRM projects and CRM systems.............................................16 2.4 Characteristics of CRM........................................................................18 2.5 Main areas of CRM...............................................................................28 2.6 Benefits and challenges .........................................................................47 2.7 Companies using CRM systems...........................................................50 2.8 Summary................................................................................................52
Chapter 3 Research Methodology ....................................................................52 3.1 Introduction ...........................................................................................52 3.2 Critical Success Factors (CSFs) ...........................................................53 3.3 CSFs method..........................................................................................55 3.4 Case-study survey .................................................................................58 3.5 Inductive approach ...............................................................................60 3.6 Desktop research ...................................................................................61 3.7 Research design .....................................................................................62 3.8 Limitations .............................................................................................64 3.9 Summary................................................................................................65
Chapter 4 Analysis and Findings ......................................................................66 4.1 Introduction ...........................................................................................66 4.2 Case study: Frontier Bank ...................................................................66 4.3 Case study: Parish National Bank (PNB) ...........................................73 4.4 Case study: the Housing and Development Board (HDB) ................80 4.5 Case study: Tieto-X Plc.........................................................................87 4.6 Case study: International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) .............92 4.7 Case study: University College Cork.................................................100 4.8 Case study: Shanghai General Motors (Shanghai GM) ..................105 4.9 Case study: Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited (TH-UNIS)..................................................................................................................... 116
Chapter 5 Discussion........................................................................................122 5.1 Introduction .........................................................................................122
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5.2 Marketing ............................................................................................122 5.3 Sales ......................................................................................................124 5.4 Customer service .................................................................................126 5.5 Summary..............................................................................................131
Chapter 6 Conclusion and Further Research................................................132 6.1 Conclusion............................................................................................132 6.2 Further research..................................................................................133
Bibliography .....................................................................................................134 Bibliography of Case Studies ..........................................................................141 Appendix 1 ........................................................................................................144 Appendix 2 ........................................................................................................146 Appendix 3 ........................................................................................................148 Appendix 4 ........................................................................................................150 Appendix 5 ........................................................................................................152 Appendix 6 ........................................................................................................154 Appendix 7 ........................................................................................................156 Appendix 8 ........................................................................................................158 Appendix 9 ........................................................................................................160
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Table of Figures
Figure 1 – Relationships among CRM strategy, projects and systems ... Error!
Bookmark not defined. Figure 2 – The Integration of CRM...................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 3 – An end-to-end CRM infrastructure ... Error! Bookmark not defined. Figure 4 – The Butler Group Model of the CRM MarketError! Bookmark not
defined. Figure 5 – CSF Procedure for Determining CSFs of CRMError! Bookmark
not defined. Figure 6 – Framework of a case-study survey inductive approach......... Error!
Bookmark not defined. Figure 7 – Framework for conducting CSFs method and case-study survey
.......................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background, motivation and aim
As the markets are getting more diverse and more competitive, companies
are forced to find various new competitive advantages to regain their lost prior
positions in businesses. In recent years, Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) has been one of these new competitive advantages discussed most in both
industrial and academic fields. Like Xu et al (2002:442) have suggested,
‘Customer relationship management (CRM) became the number one focus when
today’s competitive markets were getting more saturated and competitive.’
The rise of CRM as a business notion or marketing strategy is an inevitable
trend with the productivity development of human society. As presented by
Bose (2002), there is a sequence of different phases in business orientations.
During 1850s, products are commonly lack, and without diversity. Hence,
businessmen could sell almost everything they had produced. The market was
defined as sellers’ market, and businesses focus on production. In early 1900s,
business competition gradually rose, and companies had to convince customers
to buy their products. This was known as sales orientation businesses. To
1950s, corporations found that it was more competitive to divide customers into
segments according to their common characteristics, and promote products or
services base on segments’ specific needs. This is what is called marketing
orientation. Now we are at the beginning of customer-centric orientation
businesses. It is the result of the market that is capable to offer enormous
various and rich products and services, which is also competitive enough that had
never been. Another classification of marketing environments is to divide the
growing phases into mass marketing, target marketing, and relationship
marketing/one-to-one marketing (Ahn et al., 2003; Dyché, 2002). No matter
which one is better in theory, both of the marketing development descriptions
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have revealed the customer-focused trend in business field.
Customer-centric orientation businesses require companies to treat
customers individually and uniquely. Products or services they offered should
address each customer’s personal preferences or habits, during the relationship
between customers and companies. In this way, firms are able to retain existing
customers, keep long-term relationships with them, and also attract new
customers at the same time. By lengthening customers lifecycle or upgrading
customers’ ranking positions involving in business, corporations can then
maximise profits gaining from them. Xu et al. (2002) conclude that successful
companies in the future are the ones that can use customer information wisely,
and build long-term relationships with their customers. Therefore CRM is
crucial to companies’ success in both current and future business circumstances.
However, examine CRM systems in practice, implementation of the systems
is not so optimistic. Although investments in CRM are significant, a recent and
broader survey still estimates that 70 per cent of companies will ultimately fail
(Bull, 2003). As stated by Dyché (2002:6), ‘…CRM’s failures are vast and
visible’. Hence companies are actually experiencing various difficulties in
CRM system implementation.
To sum up, there are three factors leading to the research of CRM.
The inevitable trend of relationship marketing;
The necessity of successful businesses in the future;
Difficulties experienced in CRM systems implementation in practice.
Moreover, Bull (2003) points out empirical studies of CRM are still
insufficient currently, and only a few are available. It is also identified that
majority existing CRM literatures tend to be general in discussion, because CRM
is still a new phenomenon for many businesses (Ngai, 2005). The study about
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CRM is recommended to be more specific into the functions, which comprise
marketing, sales, and customer service. Similar opinion is supported by Sin et
al. (2005:1265), in which they think CRM ‘will remain underdeveloped until its
key dimensions have been identified and operationalized’.
Thus this research made an attempt to conduct a case-study survey,
respectively examining CRM systems in marketing, sales, and customer service
to identify critical success factors (CSFs) for CRM implementation in
organisations.
1.2 Research question and objectives
According to the aim of the research, the research question of the
dissertation is defined as:
‘What are the CSFs involved in implementing CRM in organisations?’
Research objectives are the sub goals or steps developed to achieve the aim
or address the research question. Therefore they are identified as follows:
Define and discuss CRM as an organisation concept;
Characterise success in CRM implementation;
Define CSFs for CRM implementation;
Classify CSFs identified in the research.
The first two objectives were accomplished in Chapter 2, the third one was
achieved in Chapter 4, and the last one was fulfilled in Chapter 5.
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1.3 Research methodology
The main framework of the methodology was an inductive approach, which
was through data collection to build up the theory. The data collection was
conducted by surveying a range of case study reports about CRM projects in
companies and organisations. The theory to be built was the CSFs for the
implementation of CRM in organisations.
Other methods were also utilised within the inductive framework, namely
the CSFs method and desktop research. Furthermore, the concept of CSFs was
introduced in the methodology. Combining the framework, methods and
concept, a customised methodology design in the context of the research was
finally developed.
1.4 Structure of the dissertation
The dissertation is organised in a structure as follows:
Chapter 1 introduces the background of the research, from which it
derives the research aim, question, objectives, and methodology;
Chapter 2 reviews CRM literatures and discusses CRM from its concept,
related concepts, characteristics, main functional areas, benefits and
challenges, and applications in companies;
Chapter 3 specifies methodology used in the research with general
framework, methods, customised design, and its limitations;
Chapter 4 analyses the case studies selected following the methodology
designed, and identifies individual case study’s CSFs;
Chapter 5 combines and categorises individual case study’s CSFs into
three main functional areas, and concludes the global CSFs for CRM
implementation;
Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation and makes recommendations for
future work.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Overview
The interest in CRM originated in 1990s (Law et al., 2003; Ling and Yen,
2001; Xu et al., 2002), and ‘gained widespread recognition in the late 1990s’
(Law et al., 2003:51). It is a fact that IT-based CRM systems have been
adopted in many industry sectors, and cases or theories about it are also widely
reported and discussed by both practitioners and researchers (Xu and Walton,
2005). However, while there is significant investment in CRM projects and
applications, e.g. approximate US$1.9 billion globally in 1998 (IDC and AMR
Research, 2001, cited in Bull, 2003), average US$2.2 million to each company in
2001 (CIO Research Reports, 2002); the failure rate is quite high at the same
time. Kotorov (2003) cited the report of Meta Group by indicating about 55
percent to 75 percent CRM projects failed in 2001.
Facing the disappointing situation, there are two main types of attitudes.
One attitude raises suspicions on CRM as a business concept and model (Kotorov,
2003). With the boom and bust of Internet companies from the 1990s to the
2000s, a large number of business concepts appeared and became popular
quickly. However, many of them disappeared soon after, and were proved to be
mere buzzwords. The concept of CRM was formed at the peak of the Internet
boom coincidently, and its practice in business environment was not so optimistic.
As a result, people began to consider whether it was simply another buzzword.
Another viewpoint ascribes the failure to organisations and companies that
implement CRM systems (Light, 2003). The managers rush to embrace the
newly emerged concept and its technologies before they understand it well. The
phenomenon is criticised by Light (2003:603) through pointing out: new
IT-based systems and concepts ‘are devoured by organisations with little thought
for existing and past experiences’; ‘organisations have leaped before they
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looked’. Besides the latest case in CRM, similar examples have already
appeared repetitively in enterprises: business process reengineering (BPR),
enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and the dot com arena.
Organisations and companies should have learned lessons from all these
experience.
On the other hand, although CRM system implementations tend to fail,
there still are some successful projects. According to Kotorov (2003), by
adopting CRM systems successfully, organisations have developed great
competitive advantage. It further makes CRM a sheer necessity to survive for
those organisations’ competitors. In his work, Kotorov (2003:567) even names
CRM ‘the third most significant revolution in the organization of business’,
which follows ‘the invention of the factory built by Thomas Lombe in 1718 in
England’, and ‘the introduction of the assembly line into the factory production
process by Henry Ford in 1913’.
Therefore the successful side of CRM proves the feasibility of the concept
in real enterprise context, and offers companies certain managerial patterns to
follow (Kotorov, 2003). Corresponding to the points of view above, CRM
should not be called as a buzzword, because of the existence of successful
evidence. But it indeed has neither a crystal clear definition nor best practices
till now, for it is still a fairly new theory and technology under developing in the
information systems field. This factor contributes to difficulties for companies
to better capture the concept and rationales behind it, let alone to execute the
project in practice. Thus organisations and companies themselves are not all to
be blamed, yet managers are responsible for taking the complexity of CRM
project into account. It is not just to install the software and hardware, it
requires the organisation to fully comprehend the concept of CRM, and adapt
itself to the system from people, process and technology perspectives (Chen and
Popovich, 2003).
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In short, CRM is a rising concept and practice in business and IT areas.
With its development in theory and practice, it is becoming more and more
competent to bring organisations new competitive advantages when dealing
business with customers. Because of the benefits as well as much controversy it
brings, CRM is becoming more attractive to both researchers and practitioners.
2.2 What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
As a matter of fact, managing customer relationships has continuously
existed in businesses for quite a long time (Bose, 2002; Ahn et al., 2003). At
the very beginning, it mainly depends on businessmen’s personal skills and
experience, which can only be applied in rather limited scopes, e.g. during
personal interactions (Ling and Yen, 2001), and in niche markets. With the
development of productivity and markets, businesses experience ages of mass
marketing, target marketing, and recently have arrived at the beginning of
relationship marketing or one-to-one marketing (Ahn et al., 2003; Bose, 2002;
Dyché, 2002; Ling and Yen, 2001). Once again, companies become aware of
the necessity to address individual customer’s needs, customise products and
services accordingly, and so on. Except economic reasons, advances in
information technology (IT) and information systems (IS), such as the Web, data
warehousing, data mining and so on, play an important part in driving the trend
of CRM (Ahn et al., 2003; Bose, 2002; Ling and Yen, 2001). Without them, it
is neither possible to realise relationship marketing on a mass scale, nor CRM
will grow as another new focus in IT and IS fields that stimulates and facilitates
companies in business. In addition, Light (2003) also suggests that
organisations’ contemporary recognition of managing relationships with
customers could be largely connected with the rise of CRM software packages,
which may even before managers pay their attention to the concept of
relationship marketing and CRM per se.
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Since CRM is quite a new phenomenon in marketing that emerges just in a
few years’ time, the formation of its theory and best practice are still under way.
During the period, several definitions are developed, and relatively popular ones
are exemplified as follows:
‘CRM is an information industry term for methodologies, software, and
usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer
relationships in an organized way’ (Xu et al., 2002:442);
‘CRM is a process designed to collect data related to customers, to
grasp features of customers, and to apply those qualities in specific
marketing activities’ (Swift, 2001);
‘CRM is an integration of technologies and business processes used to
satisfy the needs of a customer during any given interaction’ (Bose,
2002:89).
The three definitions reflect different understandings of CRM from different
points of view. The first one focuses on technologies, and defines CRM from
computer science perspective; the second one emphasises CRM as a business
process, representing standpoint of the manager; and the last one combines
opinions of the two, but the concept is rather broad and general. As can be seen,
with the technology-based background, the definition tends to be technologically
and functionally oriented. Basically, they all lack a holistic view over the
enterprise, which is the main actor in the CRM adoption and business
transformation activities. At the same time, the concept inclines to be
introduced in a general way, which is not specific enough for novices.
As research and practice in CRM progress, more comprehensive insights are
being obtained gradually, and scholars are able to refine the theory with clearer
goals and characteristics. Kotorov (2003:566) points out and demonstrates that
‘CRM is a strategy not a solution and can provide enormous competitive
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advantage if implemented in a co-operative environment’. In his opinion, CRM
is no longer simply considered as software packages or systems implemented in
certain functional departments in a company; it is promoted onto an integrated
enterprise-wide levelled strategy and project (Ling and Yen, 2001).
Surrounding this notion, various advanced concepts of CRM are further
defined in many literatures. However, there is still not a universally accepted
definition, and CRM may be described from different themes and perspectives
(Ling and Yen, 2001; Nevin, 1995; Ngai, 2005). On the other hand, it is
necessary to have a clear idea about CRM in the research. Hence, by
synthesising representative concepts observed so far (Chen and Popovich, 2003;
Gulati and Garino, 2000; Kincaid, 2003; Kotler and Armstrong, 1994; Ling and
Yen, 2001; Ngai, 2005; Parvatiyar and Sheth, 2001; Payne, 2000; Sin et al. 2005;
Swift, 2001), the definition of CRM in this study is proposed below.
CRM is a customer-driven, cross-functional, technology-integrated business
strategy, combining people, processes, technology and information to create,
maintain and enhance long-term individualised relationships with targeted
profitable (current and potential) customers, aiming to improve customer
acquisition, retention, and loyalty across their whole lifecycles, and finally
maximise customer lifetime value for both the company and the customer.
The definition determines the nature of CRM is a business strategy. It has
three basic characteristics: ‘customer-driven’, ‘cross-functional’ and
‘technology-integrated’. In other words, they respectively are customer-centric
focus that drives businesses fundamentally; holistic approach that usually
requires scale of the CRM project is enterprise-wide; and technology
empowerment that integrates advanced IT and IS technologies to support CRM
practice in businesses (Ling and Yen, 2001). The characteristics were explained
in more detail in Section 2.4. The business processes utilised in CRM strategy
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is managing selective customer relationships, with the integrated efforts
involving factors like people, processes, technology and information in
organisations. The goals of CRM are to increase customer acquisition and
loyalty, as well as enhance customer profitability, which is also called customer
lifetime value (CLV), for the firm and customer.
2.3 CRM, CRM projects and CRM systems
As discussed above, the trend of CRM should be greatly attributed to
technological advances in IT and IS. A number of customer-centric practices in
businesses field are more likely to be stimulated by the introduction of CRM
software packages. It is worthy for the research to investigate how the
implementations of CRM systems have influenced the businesses, and then find
out key components within the system. Therefore understanding what CRM
systems are is also essential. Supported by theory of CRM proposed above,
CRM systems can be defined as: computer-based systems aimed at assisting
organisations in realising customer-focused CRM business strategy (Bull, 2003;
Corner and Hinton, 2002; Light, 2003; Xu and Walton, 2005). From the
definition, it is clear that CRM systems are the subset of CRM strategy.
Displayed in diagram, the relationships can be illustrated as follows.
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As shown above, CRM systems are further specified as the subset of CRM
projects, while CRM projects also belong to CRM strategy (or CRM) as one part.
The scope covered by CRM strategy is the widest. In practice, it generally
needs to organise resources from key factors in organisations, such as people,
business processes, technology, information, and so on. Some activities
involved in the processes to realise the customer-centric goals may only require
effective management or business measures. In other words, not every
activities conducted around the strategy make use of IT or IS. Activities with
and without assistance of technologies and CRM systems, work cooperatively to
achieve company’s CRM strategy. The main difference between CRM strategy
and projects is their different duration (Ho, 2006). CRM strategy is a long-term
goal that firms want to finally arrive at. It may take the whole lifetime of the
company to pursue. But the duration of one CRM project can range from 1 day
to 10 years (Ho, 2006), which is the implementation of CRM strategy.
Realising one CRM strategy can include several CRM projects. CRM systems
CRM Systems
CRM Projects
CRM Strategy
Tech
nolo
gy S
uppo
rt
Bus
ines
s Gui
danc
e
Figure 1 – Relationships among CRM strategy, projects and systems adapted from Ho (2006)
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are the technological infrastructures supporting CRM innovation in organisations.
In the diagram, the two arrows represent the mutual effects among the three
concepts. Arrow on the left shows business guidance is passed down from the
CRM strategy, to CRM projects, and to CRM systems. Arrow on the right
shows technology support is provided bottom-up from the reverse direction.
Therefore, with the guidance of the customer-centric business notion, CRM
utilises IT tools to implement business process, which is to collect, gather,
analyse customer information, and interact with or differentiate them accordingly,
in order to gain customer’s loyalty to the company and maximise profits by
lengthen their lifecycles. As a result, a primary driving force to realise CRM is
IT technologies. Based on this, the dissertation focused more on the
functionalities and implementation of CRM systems, but also kept close
examination of each case’s CRM strategy.
2.4 Characteristics of CRM
In Section 2.2, definitions of CRM and CRM systems have been clarified.
For a better comprehension, it is important to characterise CRM more
specifically as well. As mentioned above, it comprises three basic
characteristics, customer-centric focus, holistic approach and technology
empowerment (Ling and Yen, 2001).
1) The essential theoretical foundation of CRM strategy is customer-centric
focus. It means CRM projects should be developed and implemented with the
customer-centric focus embedded as a central theoretical guidance, regardless
how advanced systems are applied or few technologies are used. The detailed
contents of customer-centric concept can be explained as follows.
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CRM helps companies to understand customers’ current needs, things they
have done in the past, and what they plan to do in the future (Xu et al., 2002).
Through the acquisition, analysis, interpretation and utilisation of
information and knowledge about customers, firms are enabled to create a
more personal interaction with them according to individual preferences
(Bose, 2002). Moreover, with enough understanding of their customers,
companies can reasonably determine that which ones to keep and which ones
to lose (Dyché, 2002), and properly allocate resources in areas that affect
customer relationships, e.g. communications, customer service,
product/service development, pricing strategies, and so on (Xu et al., 2002).
These then reveal an important customer-centric concept, building and
nurturing customer relationships.
Besides managing customers and monitoring customised business processes
during each customer interaction, CRM also has the ability to change and
modify customer relationships (Dyché, 2002). As Law et al (2003) have
explained, people’s thoughts and behaviours may be reinforced or further
changed via meaningful communications. It is to say, during a customer’s
contacts with the company, company can influence his/her attitude and
personal emotion toward it. If the company delivers memorable experience,
good feelings, or even its humanised culture successfully, it will lead the
relationship to positive and durable.
In the long-term, CRM is aiming to improve customer satisfaction, and then
be able to enhance customer acquisition, retention and loyalty (Bose, 2002;
Xu and Walton, 2005; Xu et al., 2002). In this way, companies can sell
products and services more effectively and efficiently, and reduce costs at
the same time. Thus by increasing the value of interaction during each
customer’s lifecycle, CRM achieves its ultimate goal, to maximise profits,
which is measured by customer lifetime value (CLV) in relationship
marketing.
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Although many customer-centric concepts are discussed around CRM, the
scope of ‘customer’ is still not so explicit. Taking majority points of view
into consideration, the term ‘customer’ may be fairly broad (Bose, 2002;
Galbreath and Rogers, 1999; Xu et al., 2002). It could include vendors,
channel partners, suppliers, employees (internal customers), e-customers and
the ultimate customers of company’s goods and services. Bose (2002:89)
believes that ‘customer’ may be ‘virtually any group or individual that
requires information from the organization’. Nevertheless, some attributes
of the customer have already been confirmed. In the context of CRM,
‘customer’ means profitable customers and customer groups carefully
selected from the mass market (Kotler and Armstrong, 1994; Ling and Yen,
2001; Ngai, 2005; Parvatiyar and Sheth, 2001; Payne, 2000; Sin et al., 2005).
Furthermore, it covers company’s current and potential customers (Ling and
Yen, 2001).
Another important correlated concept is relationship marketing (RM). The
striking similarities and interchangeable usage between CRM and
relationship management have been observed by many scholars (Light, 2003;
Sheth and Parvatiyar, 2000). Payne et al. (1998) indicates that relationship
marketing pays more attention to customer retention, as it is more profitable
to retain existing customers than acquire new ones. Viewing in a broader
social context, it is defined as marketing that seen as relationships, networks
and interaction (Gummesson, 1999). It is constituted by the networks
between the organisation, its market, and the society. By building
long-standing win-win relationships with individual customers and other
stakeholder parties, they create values cooperatively. It is a general
acknowledgement that CRM evolves from relationship marketing, and
relationship marketing is the theoretical basis of CRM (Light, 2001).
Meanwhile, the content covered by relationship marketing is also thought to
be richer than CRM’s (Ho, 2006). According to Sin et al. (2005), three
remarkable distinctions exist between the two concepts. First, relationship
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marketing is more strategic in nature, whilst CRM is more tactical per se.
Second, relationship marketing is more emotional and behavioural, whilst
CRM is more managerial. Third, relationship marketing builds connections
with a larger range of stakeholders, e.g. may include governments,
competitors, non-profit organisations, and strategic alliances (Peck et al.,
1999), whilst CRM focuses more on key customers. However, judging
from the definition and characters of CRM discussed above, the differences
between CRM and relationship marketing are gradually diminishing.
When CRM is fully developed in the future, it might be able to completely
realise entire theories of relationship marketing.
2) The second important characteristic is that CRM is a holistic approach or
enterprise-wide approach. It means CRM is no longer regarded as the
responsibility of particular departments within the organisation, i.e. sales
department, marketing department, or customer service department, like what it
is used to be at the early stages. Instead, it asks for the seamless cooperation of
different functional components across the whole enterprise. Details of the
enterprise-wide approach could be described in following aspects.
Responding to the need of building relationships with customers, sales,
marketing and customer service departments need to integrate all the data,
information, and knowledge of customers dispersed not only in themselves
but also across other business units (Kotorov, 2003). A typical case in point
is accounting department. Thus it is natural to break departmental
boundaries, change processes, functions and systems in other departments, in
order to smooth the flow of data and create the 360 degrees view of the
customer. In this sense, Kotorov (2003) emphasises CRM is a corporate
level project rather than a departmental level project, which demands
cross-functional efforts and contribution from the whole organisation.
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Xu et al. (2002) further specify that CRM integrates sales, marketing,
customer service, field support and other functions that touch customers. In
addition, Galbreath and Rogers (1999) also include enterprise resource
planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) functions in. The
former emphasises CRM requires the integration of business functions
having contacts with customers, which could be seen as the ‘front-office’ of
an enterprise; the latter supplements the need for the support from inner
organisational functions, to ensure products and services can be delivered in
time as well as the seamless flow of customer data. These could be
regarded as the ‘back-office’ of a company. The position and relation of
CRM with other enterprise application systems could be demonstrated as in
Figure 2.
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As discussed above, carrying out CRM implies fundamental changes in
company’s infrastructures in aspects like business processes and
technologies. Due to the scale and complexity of CRM projects, it is
essential to secure the involvement and commitment of senior management
(Kotorov, 2003). Only the highest leadership is powerful enough to force
the transformation of the entire organisation, and eliminate any obstacle
appears in the way by top-down measures. Moreover, it also relies on the
senior executive team to effectively obtain and allocate important resources,
Enterprise
Resource
Planning
Figure 2 – The Integration of CRM adapted from Butler Group (2001)
ERP Customer
Relationship
Management
CRM
Enterprise
Application
Integration
EAI
Enterprise
Intelligence
KM/BI
Finance, Accounts, Management Control
Stakeholders
Bus
ines
s Par
tner
s
Supp
ly C
hain
Man
agem
ent
Cus
tom
ers,
Res
elle
rs
Selli
ng C
hain
Man
agem
ent
Employees
Admin Control, HR, OR, Purchasing
24
namely people, time and money.
Finally, companies should equally have a clear idea that the enterprise-wide
approach tends to be repeatable, in order to support the continual analysis
and refinement in building and maintaining customer relationships (Bose,
2002; Ling and Yen, 2001).
3) The last characteristic returns to technological aspect. It is the IT and IS
finally accomplishing the success of CRM, and at the same time distinguishing
CRM from manual business practices. Generally speaking, CRM systems
mainly include data warehouse, data mining, call centre, contact management,
workflow and business process management, Web site, and intranet/extranet.
Functional departments involved in the system range from sales, marketing,
customer service and support, to finance, human resources, production etc. (Bose,
2002; Chen and Popovich, 2003; Ngai, 2005; Xu and Walton, 2005; Xu et al.,
2002). To gain a comprehensive picture of the application, CRM technologies
are illustrated below.
Ling and Yen (2001) divide CRM systems into two fundamental components,
operational systems for customer interaction, and informational systems for
customer knowledge and information. A more prevalent saying is the
operational CRM and analytical CRM, which has been acknowledged by
many researchers (Dyché, 2002; Xu and Walton, 2005). Alternatively,
Dyché (2002) also names them front-office CRM, and back-office or
strategic CRM respectively. To prevent confusion, the study adopts terms
‘operational CRM’ and ‘analytical CRM’.
Operational CRM are CRM systems that have direct contacts with customers
(Dyché, 2002). ‘Points’ where companies interact with the customer are
called ‘touch points’ in literatures. Through operational CRM, the
organisation is able to collect customer data from various touch points
(contact centre, mail, e-mail, fax, web, sales, stores, kiosks, etc), and
25
assemble all the data in a central database in an organised way (Chen and
Popovich, 2003; Xu and Walton, 2005). Later, information about specific
customers can be accessed and tracked by the staff, when he/she contacts the
same customers. In this way, operational CRM can create seamless and
personalised communications with customers, improve the efficiency of
company’s response, and minimise information loss or fragments.
However, the operational-natured systems cannot guarantee the optimisation
of customer service (Dyché, 2002). Then it must resort to the analytical
CRM.
Analytical CRM plays a critical role in understanding customer behaviours
that occurred in the touch points (Dyché, 2002). On one hand, it utilises
advanced technologies and analytical tools to process customer data stored
in the central database to produce results such as customer profiles,
behaviour patterns, satisfaction level, customer segmentation etc (Ling and
Yen, 2001; Xu and Walton, 2005). Basing on the results, companies are
able to determine more appropriate marketing campaigns, promotion
strategies to particular customers. Key technologies involved in are known
as data warehouse and data mining. On the other hand, analytical CRM is
also responsible for continually improving and refining business practices
facing customers to better address their different and changing preference.
This is known as the design and automation of business processes, and it
mainly relies on tracking feedbacks from customers and results of customer
interaction. By resorting to the analytical functions of CRM systems,
enterprises are able to increase the effectiveness of customer service, which
means to optimise relationships with customers.
As Ling and Yen (2001) have stated, the ultimate CRM impact on businesses
can be realised only when relationship knowledge is utilised through proper
relationship actions to deliver customised products and services. Therefore
it is vital for operational CRM and analytical CRM to work together,
improve organisation’s abilities in maintaining customer relationships in
26
both efficiency and effectiveness, and finally achieve the business goals.
The combined structure of operational and analytical CRM from
technological perspective is illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3 – An end-to-end CRM infrastructure
adapted from Dyché (2002)
Call
Centre
Web
Access E-mail Usage
Direct
Sales Fax
Customers
Refined Business Actions
Business Intelligence
Process Improvement
Integrated Database
Accounts payable/receivable
Call centre Sales
Customer Feedback
Provisioning Billing
Customers Touchpoints
Analysis
Information
Business Systems
27
Except the three basic characteristics suggested by Ling and Yen (2001),
different sets of characteristics of CRM are also developed in different literatures.
In their work, Xu et al (2002) propose four characteristics for CRM: salesforce
automation, customer service and support, field service, and marketing
automation. These are considered in CRM’s functional point of view, and are
more likely to be seen as the main business units in CRM systems. They are
introduced in detail in the following section, which reveal the specific functional
modules in CRM.
Another useful point of view is put forward by Ho (2006), which concludes
six characteristics that a CRM strategy should possess for the successful
implementation.
1) Base on an integrated central customer database;
2) Ability to collect customer information from various contact channels,
and provide consistent data when needed regardless which channel is
used;
3) Ability to transfer information with speed and convenience to system
users, especially through mobile, wireless devices or the Internet;
4) Ability to provide automatic tools for marketing, sales and customer
service, and seamlessly integrate these three;
5) Ability to extract useful information from a great amount of customer
information and transaction data for decision making, which is known
as business intelligence (BI);
6) Ability to be compatible with other enterprise application systems, e.g.
ERP systems.
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2.5 Main areas of CRM
As mentioned in Section 2.3, the research is targeted on CRM systems. In
order to examine them in depth, it is necessary to establish systematic models to
be based on. On the other hand, specific business functions included in a CRM
project may also be crucial to its success, but not necessarily involve
technologies. Because the purpose of this study is to finally find out what
contribute to successful implementation of CRM, it is reasonable to count in
those business factors too. According to that, the model is created containing
three major functional components (Ngai, 2005; Xu et al., 2002): Marketing;
Sales; and Customer Service. In business term, these three parts also form the
life cycle of a customer relationship that circulates from marketing, to sales, and
to customer service. The model is established mainly based on the work of
Dyché (2002) and Butler Group (2001).
1) CRM develops with the evolution of marketing, from direct sales to mass
marketing, target marketing, and to customer relationship marketing (Ling and
Yen, 2001). Thus CRM is closely related to marketing. Marketing tools
provided by CRM include data warehouse, data mining, marketing analysis,
clustering and segmentation (Xu et al., 2002). They facilitate salespersons in
developing successful marketing strategies and campaigns. To put in detail,
marketing module in CRM includes:
Campaign Management
Campaign management software depends greatly on the company’s
customer database (Dyché, 2002). The richer customer data and information a
company has obtained, the better campaign management software could
understand customer behaviours and design relationship marketing campaign.
Campaign management assists users to address the full campaign lifecycle,
which includes ‘campaign definition’, ‘planning’, ‘customer segmentation’,
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‘scheduling’, ‘response management’, and ‘opt-in versus opt-out processing’.
Through the automation and integration of campaign workflow, it shortens
marketing lifecycle and save much time for people to focus on customers rather
than the administration of marketing process itself. It is then possible to launch
multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously. Therefore campaign
management could improve not only the quality but also the quantity of
marketing campaigns, and finally brings more profits to organisations. By
referring to results of previous promotion activities, the organisation could refine
its following campaigns. As time goes by, the design of marketing campaigns
will become better and better, and generate more and more revenues.
Cross-Selling and Up-Selling
‘Cross-selling is the act of selling a product or service to a customer as a
result of another purchase’ (Dyché, 2002:31). It helps companies sell more
products or services to current customers, rather than find new ones. Up-selling
means trying to motivate existing customers to purchase more profitable products
or services. The two kinds of promotions require understanding of how
customers would respond. Otherwise, choosing unprofitable products or
unsuitable customers will decrease the overall profits firms can earn from
individuals. Thus cross-selling and up-selling may resort to the analysis results
from CRM marketing automation technologies.
Corporate Customer Management
It involves how the organisation uses marketing automation technologies to
understand its customers, and further formulates corresponding marketing
campaign. In the study, it is divided into six parts, and they are explained as
follows:
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Customer Retention. The functional component is responsible for finding
out exactly who have left the businesses and why (Dyché, 2002). At the same
time, it distinguishes existing customers who are valuable to the company and
predicts who are likely to leave. By applying tailored promotion activities to
them, the company expects to reduce customer defections. It also helps
companies to design marketing campaigns elevating low-value customers to
high-value ones rather than letting them slip away. In short, customer retention
seizes every opportunity to keep customers stay with the organisation.
Behaviour Prediction. Through sophisticated modelling and data mining
techniques, behaviour prediction makes use of customer behaviours in the past to
predict behaviours in the future. The analysis basically includes (Dyché,
2002:33):
‘Propensity-to-buy analysis. Understanding which products a
particular customer is likely to purchase.
Next sequential purchase. Predicting what product or service a
customer is likely to buy next.
Product affinity analysis. Understanding which products will be
purchased with other products…
Price elasticity modelling and dynamic pricing. Determining the
optimal price for a given product, often for a given customer or
customer segment’.
Basing on the knowledge, company is enabled to determine appropriate
marketing plans.
Customer Value Modelling. Customer value may refer to a customer’s
lifetime value, potential value, or competitive value (wallet share) (Dyché, 2002).
By building its own customer value modelling to calculate each customer’s
profitability to the company, managers can decide the most appropriate ways to
communicate with the target clients and differentiate customer service. The
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success of customer value modelling relies on intensive and accurate data and
information about customers and business processes relating to them.
Channel Optimisation. It means to choose the right channels interacting
with particular customers according to their personal preferences, and understand
how to determine the best approaches for each client (Dyché, 2002).
Personalisation. It is ‘the capability to customize customer communication
based on knowledge preferences and behaviors at the time of interaction’ (Dyché,
2002:35). By utilising customer profile data, past purchases, clickstream data,
and Web survey responses, personalisation technologies are widely used on the
Web sites to deliver tailored messages to individual customers to make them stay
or promote new products. Two main techniques involved are ‘adaptive
personalisation’ and customer clickstream analysis. The former delivers the
following personalised messages according to specific customer’s historical
behaviours and preferences; and the latter reveals a customer’s movements on the
Web sites for companies to further customise web pages and information on them
correspondingly.
Customer Privacy. Since marketing activities deeply root in the use and
share of customer data and information, it causes the problem of customer’s
personal privacy. Not every client is willing to expose himself/herself to the
organisation. Even those who are willing to will not prefer to be bothered by
advertisements all the time. Hence customer privacy is increasingly noticed by
people. Like the opinion of Dyché (2002:43), ‘each customer’s privacy
preference should be solicited and incorporated into his customer profile and
should then be unequivocally honored’.
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2) Interaction plays a very special role in sales area (Xu et al., 2002).
Through effective interaction with customers, companies can offer customised
solutions, create relationship value, enhance customer loyalty, and reduce
business cost (Sin et al., 2005). Key technological application is well known as
sales force automation (SFA), which is a relatively matured system that has been
developed earlier than CRM system itself. Sales module in CRM is listed
below:
Sales Force Automation
SFA is normally considered made up of following functional components:
Sales Process/Activity Management. Sales process management provides
a unified sales process throughout the company, containing ‘opportunity
generated’, ‘lead allocated’, ‘prospect contacted’, ‘prospect qualified’, ‘solution
identified’, and ‘order placed’ (Dyché, 2002:82). It also allows companies to
customise the procedure depending on their own needs. Thus the uniform
process enables organisations to improve staff training, reduce human error, and
achieve greater productivity. On the other hand, activity management allocates
activities for salespersons respectively on individual, team and organisation
levels. This in turn assist management to schedule and assign tasks properly.
It also offers analysis of previous sales lifecycles, which helps organisation to
refine sales processes in the future.
Sales and Territory Management. By supplying data and optional reports
of sales activities, sales management tools allow sales managers and executives
to control and track performances of sales tasks before, during, and after the
order (Dyché, 2002). First, sales management assists managers to create sales
teams and allocate individual salespersons according to accounts, regions, and
industries. Second, it also links sales teams to headquarter specialists, e.g.
industry experts, product managers, in order to obtain helps and guidance.
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Third, it is able to build member and team profiles by the input of staff’s personal
data. Turning to territory management, it provides sales managers tools to
oversee and monitor territory assignments for individual territories. At the
same time, it restricts an account manager’s activities in his/her own territory,
considering security issues. However, assembled data and information from
one account or many can also be offered when needed, for the convenience of
geographically distributed sales staff. In this way, sales and territory
management deepens executives’ insights into sales activities proceeding in the
organisation, and maximises the performance of individual salespersons and
teams.
Contact Management. It is responsible for ‘organizing and managing data
across and within a company’s client and prospect organizations’ (Dyché,
2002:84). Through contact management, salespersons are able to locally store
and update individual customer data and interactions, while retrieve sales activity
information, organisation charts from the company. It allows the usage of local
client databases and corporate customer databases by offering the ability to
synchronise data between the two. Therefore individual sales staff can make
good arrangement of their own sales tasks and activities that interact with the
clients. Contact management could be seen as a set of bottom-up tools enabling
salespeople to communicate their schedules to the company, whilst sales and
territory management could be regarded as top-down approaches for senior
management to monitor the whole sales activities on organisational level.
Combining the two functions, managers can effectively arrange and distribute
sales activities optimising the use of salespersons in number and personal skills.
Lead Management. Lead management is also known as ‘opportunity
management’ and ‘pipeline management’ (Dyché, 2002:85). It reserves all the
tasks, documents, communication about sales activities, and allows salespersons
to follow its predefined approaches to identify sales opportunities and realise
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them as deals. By characterising sales opportunities in advance, one kind of
lead management can allocate client leads automatically to sales individuals and
teams according on their product knowledge or territory. Another kind is able
to track and collect prospect attributes of each lead, and then analyse and predict
its possibility to change into a real order. Except assisting sales staff, lead
management is also a resource for marketing department by providing insights
into comparisons between leads and the orders produced. Through these sales
performances reported, marketing managers would acquire the satisfactory level
of previous campaign outcomes, and use the results and lessons to improve
future marketing activities. Again, lead management is also a data-intensive
tool and approach. It can be accurate and efficient only when there is enough
data.
Configuration Support. Because the tools offered by CRM help
salespeople to store and organise customer or prospect information, it makes
product-specific configuration support a reality by utilising this information
(Dyché, 2002). The functional tools usually conduct steps according to the
sales process mentioned in Sales Process/Activity Management. After an order
has been achieved, it will calculate the product configuration and price quote
automatically. Then it enables sales staff to communicate electronically with
other business units to confirm the stock and price, at the real time he/she is with
the client. On the contrary, some kinds of configuration tools also provide
functionalities for senior marketing and product management to create various
product bundles, and distribute them to field salespeople electronically.
Moreover, basing on the deals that have been made, the tools can automatically
generate contracts in standard format, and will save them in the sales staff’s field
devices, e.g. laptop. It then avoids drawbacks caused by paper-based contracts.
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Knowledge Management. Field sales is an information-intensive work,
which means sales staff should be prepared to provide clients information more
than just product information, and be familiar with not only the customer data.
Salespeople may be supposed to acquaint themselves with corporate policy,
historical sales and revenues, partner and supplier profiles, industry and
competitor information, feedbacks from other client, etc. The appearance of
knowledge management (KM) systems just meets the information needs of
salespeople. KM systems ‘locate and store such information and provide users
with a means of communicating about and adding to its contents from a single
application’ (Dyché, 2002:88). Because of its richness in corporate knowledge,
easy access, retrieval and modification through an integrated view, it is especially
valuable to the time-constrained but information-intensive field sales.
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented)
According to Dyché (2002), field force automation, FFA (also known as
‘field service management’) contains two aspects of functions. On one hand, it
serves as a part of sales force automation, utilising mobile workforce
management technologies to assist field sales. On the other hand, it also plays
an important role in customer field service, which indicates field service staff
providing services and repairing products on customers’ premises. In the sales
module, it pays more attention to sales-oriented FFA, and service-oriented FFA is
discussed in detail in customer service module below.
Sales-oriented field force automation is able to gather and use SFA
functionalities discussed above, when sales staff are conducting field sales with
customers in real time. The technological infrastructure is the Web, intranet and
Web server. SFA functions and sales data, information are provided by the Web
server located in the headquarter of an organisation, and salespeople can access
the server remotely. By keeping all the data in a central repository at
headquarters, it significantly reduces the costs and improves data security.
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Furthermore, wireless Internet access enables field personnel to retrieve and
obtain information from the outside resources. Except the traditional laptop,
various handheld devices, e.g. personal digital assistants (PDAs), cell phones and
Web phones, two-way pagers, tablet PCs, etc., begin to support
‘anytime/anywhere access via wireless networking’ (Dyché, 2002:90).
Individual field staff could choose devices depending on his/her personal
preference. In this way, field force automation is supported by both Internet
and corporate intranet from a variety of remote devices on an anytime/anywhere
base. Hence FFA greatly enhances field sales effectively and efficiently.
3) Good customer service is essential to retain existing customers and attract
potential customers. To improve customer satisfaction, companies should
respond to customers’ needs quickly and accurately (Ngai, 2005). Otherwise,
they may lose clients easily. Therefore interaction is important in supporting
this functional area. Besides, Xu et al. (2002:444) further emphasise the
importance of ‘the ability to access complete customer information from a
widely available customer database’, and ‘workflow allowing the following up of
customer issues on the service side’. Technological solutions can be assisted,
e.g. call centres, and self-service, e.g. Web browsing (Xu et al., 2002). Details
of customer service module are explained as follows:
Contact Centre
Contact Centre originates from call centre, which mainly adopts telephone
technologies to respond customers to provide services or resolve problems at the
very beginning (Butler Group, 2001). It now leverages a range of emerging
technologies, e.g. automated call distribution, call scripting, and etc., to perform
high quality customer services. The name of ‘contact centre’ just reflects call
centre’s evolution to a multi-channel customer service unit no longer only limited
in telephone. Moreover, it is also known as customer interaction centre (CIC).
The contact centre is often placed in a position crucial to the success of customer
37
service, as it usually is where customers first contact directly with the
organisation and thus can have very strong impacts on customer relationships.
In order to provide quick, accurate and consistent answers to the queries,
computer telephony integration (CTI) is used to automate various
communication processes in the contact centre (Dyché, 2002).
Call Routing. A company’s contact centres may be distributed according
to different geographical locations, or different product focuses, and so on.
However, one of the most important criteria for the success of contact centre is
the time a customer being kept on hold and waiting for a customer service
representative (CSR), the shorter the better. Hence organisations develop and
adopt a variety of managerial measures or technologies to ensure efficient call
distribution.
First, contact centres are ‘either geographically placed or open around the
clock to accommodate customers in different time zones’ (Dyché, 2002:56). In
this way, organisations could provide customer services 24 hours a day. Second,
network routers are used to automatically address each incoming call to the first
available CSR to minimise customers’ waiting time, and it is called ‘load
balancing’. Third, more sophisticated automatic call distribution technology,
‘precision call distribution’ or ‘calling line identification’ (CLI), is also available
to decide where to route the call, which utilises organisation’s intelligence about
customers (Butler Group, 2001; Dyché, 2002). By identifying the incoming call
numbers against the profile of valuable customers, CLI is able to distribute
specific customer calls to operators who have corresponding expertise to serve.
The CSR can then further differentiate their services according to the predefined
segment that the particular customer is allocated to. Fourth, interactive voice
response (IVR) systems can also function 24 hours a day to route a customer’s
call before the call reaches to a real operator. A client will need to press the
telephone keypad to make choices under the system instructions, and then IVR
38
will direct the client to automatic answers by machines or a CSR when needed.
The CSR, in turn, can obtain the period of time to define scope of the caller’s
needs that helps the operator to provide better services accordingly. Fifth,
instead of pressing keypad to choose multilayered telephone menus, automated
speech recognition allows customers to communicate with contact centres by
their voices directly and supplies more options by recognising deconstructed
phrases in digit format.
Despite the great benefits these advanced CTI technologies above have
brought, Dyché (2002) still emphasises companies should consider where to
apply which technology can maximise the impacts, understand which interaction
mode their clients prefer, and ideally, enable them to customise the interface to
their personal taste. In fact, this point of view could be regarded as the focus of
Channel Optimisation in marketing module discussed above.
Call-Scripting. Call-scripting is described to have two aspects of functions.
One function is that it is able to record and log running text transcripts of
customers’ conversations with the operator (Butler Group, 2001; Dyché, 2002).
The records and transcripts can be valuable contributions to company’s customer
profiles. They could be used by subject matter experts for further analysis, or
referred to when contacting with the same customers. The records of
customers’ interaction together with other customer data collected from various
channels and methods are gradually enriching the organisation’s customer
database. The company is then enabled to estimate customers’ behaviours and
preferences by consulting to previous similar ones cumulated in the database.
In this way, the other function of call-scripting is actually applying business
intelligence in the contact centre’s interactions with customers. Specifically,
call-scripting could provide CSRs with a set of situational scripts reminding the
operator of important talking points, the value of particular customer,
cross-selling opportunities and customer’s purchase preference, current
39
promotions, accounts payable issues, etc. Additionally, some supply natural
language support for the staff to search and retrieve useful information or
knowledge to tackle customers’ problems by entering a sentence or phrase.
Hence call-scripting helps an organisation to build it a uniform image by
providing consistent replies to common customer queries; while ensure different
levels of services are received by customers with different profitability to the
firm.
Sales Support. According to Dyché (2002), making contact centre as a
point-of-sale is a relatively new practice. It provides customer data and current
product or service information through CSR’s workstation, and then requires the
CSR using personal skills and information available to judge how to recommend
appropriate product or service to appropriate candidates during their inquiries to
the contact centre. It could say that direct sales pay more attention to obtain
new opportunities from prospects; whilst contact centre sales support
concentrates more on current customers, which can in turn free up more sales
time for the former. On one hand, the sales support is cheaper to run than direct
sales. It also delivers customers more product or service information, since
CSRs are offering information associate with customers’ own queries, they will
be more likely to be interested in it. Even though the customer does not
respond immediately to the promotion, with the suggested information kept in
mind, the possibility for him/her to come around later still increases. On the
other hand, it is critical for CSRs to be provided with accurate customer profiles,
and know well when to mention sales promotions and when to avoid.
Otherwise, it only raises customers’ repulsion, being bothered by irrelevant
products or services before they are satisfied with their queries.
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Complaints Management. The aim of complaints management is to
resolve problems that cause customer complaints (Butler Group, 2001).
Companies should attach enough importance to customers’ inquiries and
complaints, since they can have strong impacts on customer relationships.
Emerging complaints can be the opportunity for an organisation to impress the
customers and win them back, if careful, timely and proper solutions are offered;
they can also be the reason for customers to leave the business, if the customer is
dissatisfied with the poor services. Therefore it is wise for companies to put
more efforts into managing complaints or queries well. In practice, complaints
and queries are routed and assembled to management from a variety of customer
‘touch points’. Outstanding issues will be kept on a ‘to do’ list until they are
solved, and relevant reports will be sent to appropriate staff.
E-mail Management. Many companies now take the advantage of e-mail
as another kind of customer service tool, because of its relatively lower cost and
faster speed than traditional mails (Butler Group, 2001). E-mail management
comprises two aspects: to process incoming e-mails and reply them in time; to
send outbound e-mails with particular contents that the firm needs to inform
customers. One crucial requirement for answering customers’ incoming e-mails
is the response time. Several mechanisms are then developed to deal with the
huge amounts of e-mails to ensure the efficiency as well as quality of the replies.
A case in point is systems that can divide and route e-mails to appropriate
personnel or department, depending on staff’s expertise, experience and
availability. Another example is to adopt systems that can respond e-mails
automatically. It could be realised by using pattern matching and probability or
natural language systems to interpret contents of specific e-mails, and then
answering them by making use of the knowledge database. However, other
issues like language translation in e-mail management also become notable
nowadays, due to organisations’ globalisation trend. Turning to outbound
e-mails, they can play an important part in building and maintaining customer
41
relationships. Butler Group (2001:55) provides a list of them as below. From
the list, it could be inferred that outbound e-mails actually also assist the
company in marketing and sales functions, although e-mail management is
commonly considered as being compacted within the multi-channel contact
centres, which are more relevant to customer service.
‘Newsletters, newsflashes, and new product or service announcements.
Promotional discount offers to existing or potential customers.
The ability to forward promotions designed for customer acquisition
(referral/viral marketing).
Traditional direct marketing campaigns.
Orders, despatch status, and invoice notifications.
Order confirmations and personalised thank you messages.
Customer Service.
Marketing and technical support for products and services.
Alerts and reminders (replenishment notification).
Expiration notices.
Change of service notifications.
Customer surveys’.
Instant Messaging. Instant messaging is a newly emerging way for contact
centre agents to interact with customers (Butler Group, 2001). It is developed
mainly aiming at solving difficulties encountered by customers in Web-based
transactions. Many customers tend to abandon a proceeding on-line shopping,
when facing problems, e.g. can not continue because he/she does not know how
to answer mandatory questions, and could not get real-time helps from the
retailer. In this situation, resorting to the firm by either e-mail or telephone is
too slow and inconvenient. Hence instant messaging enables customers to
contact a customer service agent on-line whenever they need guidance during the
transactions, as it is a type of Web-based real-time chat tools. To customers,
this on-line customer service is cheaper than traditional telephone calls, more
42
responsive than e-mails, and most importantly, it functions almost on a real-time
base. To companies, it offers an attractive option to provide on-line customer
service. First, the approach is extremely cost-effective and flexible. Second, it
potentially enhances CSRs’ productivity, for a skilled CSR is possible to handle
multiple instant messaging sessions at the same time, but only one phone call at
one time. Third, it produces text-based conversations, so they can be tagged,
indexed, stored and reused more conveniently than phone call transcripts used in
‘call-scripting’. The processed texts could be reused when similar questions are
raised by other customers, or make contribution to FAQs (Frequently Asked
Questions).
Workforce Management. Traditionally, contact centre has the problem in
deciding how to allocate staff to maximise its performance. Workforce
management tools assist companies in staff planning and optimisation, and some
of them are specially used for contact centres (Dyché, 2002). Based on call
volumes, especially volumes at peak time, various communication channels,
customer types, and the skills, experience and availability of agents, the tools are
able to ensure customers get appropriate services. With the support of the
operational functions of contact centres, e.g. call routing, call-scripting, etc.,
workforce management can provide planning functions as follows (Dyché,
2002).
Forecast contact volumes to predict busy periods;
Suggest the optimal number of CSRs for certain peak periods;
Track performance according to customer value, priority level,
customer satisfaction, and other criteria;
Arrange personnel depending on personal skills, experience, and work
hours preference;
Globally monitor multiple contact centres, and be able to integrate
observations and findings into single reports to refine future staff
planning.
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By adjusting staff working for contact centres in these multiple dimensions,
the final goal of workforce management falls in improving customer satisfaction
levels and maintaining long-term relationships with them.
Web-based Self-service
Web-based self-service is originated from the phenomenon that different
customers continually raise a range of repetitive questions and queries, when
they are interacting with the contact centre over time (Dyché, 2002). These
questions are then technically possible to be automatically answered to support
customer service. Based on this principle, several kinds of automated customer
self-service on the Web sites are gradually evolved. The most common ones are
tracking order status, FAQs and bulletin board; and a relatively novel one can be
the cyberagents. These Web-based functions have greatly enhanced company’s
service efficiency, and moreover, they provide a 24-hour and 7-day access to
important information in consideration of customers’ own conveniences.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). The basic task for FAQs is to deliver
customers with general information of the company or organisation. Example
questions FAQs normally include are (Dyché, 2002:59):
‘Where is the company headquartered?
How do I return an item?
I’ve moved – how do I update my profile?
How do I review my account?
How do I change my password?
I have a question about my bill; what do I do?’
FAQs could be accumulated and collected from daily work that has contact
with customers, and company’s contact centres can be a good source.
According to the asking frequency of each question, companies can identify the
most often reoccurring questions that can be solved with common answers,
develop the list of standard answers, and publish on the company’s Web sites.
44
In this way, FAQs are able to represent most customers’ problems about the
organisation and its products or services, and can therefore satisfy customers at
large.
Cyberagents. Setting up cyberagents is an interesting and vivid way to
supply customer service. A cyberagent usually appear on the Web site as a
lifelike CSR with ‘his/her’ own personality, voice and facial expressions (Dyché,
2002). He/she will greet the customers with their names, can answer basic
FAQs, and guide a customer to the right web pages basing on his /her demands.
Besides supporting these basic customer services, cyberagents now begin to be
able to provide some more advanced functional features. A case in point is
making decisions for customers on the company’s behalf. By integrating
customers’ requirements, their personal profiles and other information,
cyberagents follow certain predefined procedures or rules to make appropriate
recommendations to customers. In the future, the technology may be fully
developed as ‘a personal company representative’ (Dyché, 2002:65) special for
each specific customer.
E-mail Contact. E-mail contact is a function described from customers’
points of view. The company provides its e-mail address on the Web site, and it
enables people to contact the company by sending e-mails (Dyché, 2002). In
this way, customers have more options to choose, rather than only through phone
calls or face-to-face. Moreover, e-mails free up customers from companies’
working hours, and allow they to put specific problems in detail as much as they
wish.
Bulletin Board. Bulletin board is also well known as ‘BBS’, Bulletin
Board System (Cason and Gangadharan, 1998). It is a kind of electronic
publishing board for users to post information on the Web sites. When adopted
by companies on business Web sites, the technology could be used mainly in
45
three ways. First, the company can publish newsletters, offers, promotions, and
discounts on the electronic bulletin board for its clients to scroll through. Thus
customers are informed of the most updated information all the time. Second, it
could be used as another communication channel between customers and
organisations. Customers can ask questions, give advice, or make complaints
on categorised bulletin boards, and staff in the company’s contact centres or
corresponding business units will reply and post the answers at the same areas.
Third, the organisation is also able to make use of BBS to build on-line
communities for its customers with memberships. People can share their
experiences, interests, and other information related to the organisation, or have
conversations with each other by electronically putting up texts or multimedia
information on the bulletin board. Therefore it is a good way to maintain
customer relationships and loyalty to the company. The same as other
technologies used on Web sites, bulletin board is relative cheaper than many
off-line facilities, greatly improves efficiency, and maximises customers’ access
time and flexibility.
Customer Satisfaction Measurement
Different from survey mailings in the past that are primarily conducted to
measure the satisfaction level of customers in general, surveys nowadays are able
to focus on customer segments or even specific customers with personalised
questions (Dyché, 2002). Responses are then processed, organised and stored
in customer databases and their personal profiles. Through these accumulated
results, an organisation is enabled to refine its communication with customers to
their preferred ways, as well as prioritise requested product or service
improvements according to customer segments and their relevant values.
Furthermore, electronic surveys through the Web sites are now getting more
popular than paper-based ones, since they can be more sophisticated but less
costly than the latter. Many companies also tend to commit customer surveys to
external professional survey organisations, in order to obtain more detailed and
46
specialised reports to assist in achieving their business goals.
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented)
As mentioned in ‘Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented)’ above,
service-oriented FFA is mainly concerned with sending staff to customers’ sites
to provide service or conduct repair of products (Dyché, 2002). In the system,
‘customers’ requests are logged, assigned, monitored and traced to ensure the
qualities of customer services’ (Xu et al, 2002:443). After receiving a
customer’s problems, the CSR resorts to product specialists or field service
engineers through electronic communication. Basing on their analysis and
suggestions, the CSR is then able to arrange requirements of the assignment.
For example, whether a field service representative is needed, or if needed, what
are requested in the staff’s skills, availability, tools, and so on. On the other
hand, the remote staff could receive the dispatch order through wireless devices,
such as PDA, pager, cell phone, etc. During the field service, he/she can also
utilise the equipments to locally offer useful instruction or repair information and
knowledge. Alternatively, when additional equipments or information,
knowledge supports are needed, the field staff can make orders by contacting to
customer service personnel or logging on company server via wireless devices.
At the same time, the mobile equipments also allow field service representatives
to update assignment status in the central customer database, which can be
shared in real time and may be useful to CSRs and sales staff.
In this way, field services can be more effective and efficient than
paper-based procedures in the past, and, at the same time, with low service
inventory cost. Although field force automation grows rapidly recently, the
products developed are still more sales-oriented than service-oriented (Dyché,
2002). Customer field service is even more data-intensive and time-critical than
field sales, and it contains several good customer touchpoints to collect customer
data from. Therefore service-oriented FFA is valuable for both companies and
47
vendors to further research and invest in.
2.6 Benefits and challenges
With the detailed introduction and description of CRM above, it can already
be inferred that the implementation of CRM is able to bring a large amount of
benefits to the organisation. Generally speaking, it is recognised that the
competitiveness of companies is enhanced by CRM, because it results in higher
revenues and lower operational costs for the businesses (Chen and Popovich,
2003). To be more specific, the benefits could be divided as following three
main areas (Xu et al., 2002).
Marketing
It identifies and targets the most valuable customers;
It manages marketing campaigns with clear goals and quantifiable
objectives;
It increases opportunities in marketing and cross-selling;
It enables accurate targeting and one-to-one marketing, which increases
returns on marketing investments;
It enables organisations to collect valuable knowledge through customer
interaction, which in turn improves products and services qualities.
Sales
It improves field sales, telesales and sales management through real
time information sharing among multiple sales staff;
It increased efficiency of sales processes by adopting wireless and
Web-based order entry;
It improves territory management with real time account information
updateds;
It identifies and predicts solid sales leads for salespeople;
48
It generates more revenue by focusing on developing the best accounts;
It improves the entire sales force by capturing, distributing and
leveraging the success and expertise of the company’s highest-level
performances.
Customer service
It strengthens individual customer relationships by deeper
understanding of specific customer history and preferences;
It improves contact centre efficiency and quality by supporting
automated scripting based on known solutions;
It reduces customer service costs and increases customer satisfaction by
adopting Web-based functionality directly serving customers;
It enhances customer satisfaction by centralising customers’ contact
point;
It increases customer satisfaction and retention by rapidly solving
problems at customers’ premises;
It smoothly integrates the management of field force and materials in
the organisation;
It ensures customer satisfaction by scheduling and dispatching the right
field staff, with the right tools and skills, at the right time.
Although companies could benefit a lot from CRM, implementing CRM
still faces many challenges, which often lead to the failure of CRM project (Xu et
al., 2002). Once the project fails, it could be a disaster to a company.
Therefore companies should be really careful to control the risk and minimise the
impact. Challenges that are often encountered by organisations are listed as
follows.
49
End user-driven methodology. When the project is initiated from IT
department, they might be less powerful to influence corporate decision
making;
Lack of senior management support. CRM projects are likely to be
driven by functional departments, e.g. sales or marketing, and lack in
the enterprise wide view of customers;
Lack of cultural preparation. Implementing CRM systems before end
users are ready for the customer-centric culture will result in users’
resistance or the system not being fully used;
Inappropriate application design approach. Designing CRM
applications based on a single functional view instead of an enterprise
customer view often results in failure;
Over-automation. Simply driving the design by functionalities will
lead to over-automated business functions;
Lack of appropriate network infrastructure. The network
infrastructure must be capable to support CRM applications throughout
the organisation. Inadequate network infrastructure always leads to
the project failure.
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2.7 Companies using CRM systems
The Butler Group (2001) has developed a model of the CRM market (see
Figure 4) dictating businesses that are more suitable to adopt CRM strategy.
As it shows in Figure 4, at the bottom of the model are commodity markets.
These markets are known as high volumes of sales and transactions, low price,
and low margin. Example products are books, CDs, low-end electrical goods,
food etc. Success of the businesses in these markets depends on the economies
of scale and reduction of transaction costs. Hence Web sites and transaction
automation could ensure the businesses’ competitiveness in delivering safe, quick,
cheap and good quality commodity products. Customers in these markets also
tend to be price-driven and not be loyal. Therefore the role of CRM in these
fields is thought to be very limited. But some companies still successfully
analyse its customers through the Web site using technologies like click-streams,
and a case in point is Amazon.com (Ling and Yen, 2001).
Figure 4 – The Butler Group Model of the CRM Market adapted from Butler Group (2001)
Pure Service
CRM Battleground
Commodity Markets
Degree of Permissible
Automation/ Volume of Sales
Degree of Personalisation/ Available Margin
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At the top of the model are pure service markets, which are distinguished by
low volumes of sales, high price, and high margin. Examples are solicitors,
consultancies, financial advisories, and so on. The success of these businesses
heavily relies on managing customer expectations and utilising customer data,
which is extremely customer-centric. Thus classical CRM strategy may find its
ability is limited in fully supporting pure service businesses. On the contrary,
CRM in such markets tends to be more interpersonal rather than technology
dependent. As a result, pure service markets are not the natural home for CRM
either.
Then the middle of the model is identified as ‘the real CRM battleground’.
Businesses in this field have characteristics of both commodity markets and pure
service markets. Examples in such markets are numerous (the ones not in
commodity or pure service markets) and cover a wide range of vertical markets.
These businesses are forced to appropriately balance the needs of improving
customer service with an acceptable price and the needs of controlling costs in
reasonable levels. These requirements may be addressed by combining
elements of self-service, transaction automation with a more personalised service.
Therefore businesses in ‘the real CRM battleground’ could benefit most from
CRM.
In practice, industries representative in CRM implementation are identified
as financial service industry, telecommunication industry, pharmaceutical
industry, IT manufacture and service industry, apparel industry, automotive
manufacture industry and so on (Bose, 2002; Bull, 2003; Chen and Popovich,
2003; Law et al., 2003; Lindgreen and Antioco, 2005; Puschmann and Alt, 2001).
Some individual companies and organisations are also famous in their CRM
strategies, such as HSBC, IBM, Dell, Levi’s, and Buicks etc. In particular, Dell
Computer Corporation enables its customers to configure their own computers,
from various hardware and software combinations, with an ordering system
52
providing delivery and progress information.
2.8 Summary
Through a wide range of references to literatures, this chapter introduces
and discusses concepts in the field of CRM. It first identifies the value and
ongoing debates of CRM. Then it points out that CRM is a strategy rather than
a mere computer-based system. Related concepts, CRM projects and CRM
systems are also distinguished from CRM as a strategy. The three main
characteristics of CRM are customer-centric focus, holistic approach and
technology empowerment. It also contains three main functional areas,
marketing, sales, and customer service. Except huge benefits CRM can bring to
companies, the implementation still faces a lot of challenges. Finally,
companies that are more suitable for adopting CRM are identified, and
enterprises that had successfully implemented CRM are exemplified.
Chapter 3 Research Methodology
3.1 Introduction
This chapter introduces and discusses the methodology adopted in the
research. The main framework of the methodology is an inductive approach,
which was conducted to build a theory of CSFs in CRM implementation.
Within the main inductive framework, it introduces the concept of CSFs,
discusses research methods adopted (e.g. case-study survey), design of the
research, and its limitations.
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3.2 Critical Success Factors (CSFs)
According to Griffin (1995), Critical Success Factors (CSFs) were first
proposed by Daniel in 1961, and popularised by Rockart in 1979. Nowadays,
the theory has been further developed and extended by many following
researchers, as well as applied successfully in various areas especially in business
field. The most typical definition is established by Rockart (1979:85), in which
CSFs are defined as:
‘… the limited number of areas in which results, if they are satisfactory, will
ensure successful competitive performance for the organization. They are
the few key areas where “things must go right” for the business to flourish.
If results in these areas are not adequate, the organization’s efforts for the
period will be less than desired.’
In order to achieve expected results, Rockart (1979) further indicates
activity areas identified as CSFs should receive constant and careful attention
from management. The current performance situation in each area should be
continually measured, and that information should be made available to people
who make decisions.
Rockart’s definition and instruction of CSFs are specified in the context of
organisations at the strategic planning level. Also taken his subsequent work
(Bullen and Rockart, 1981) into consideration, CSFs could be expressed more
explicitly in bullet form adopted from Caralli’s (2004) work.
key areas of activity in which satisfactory results are absolutely
necessary to guarantee successful competitive performance for the
individual, department or organisation;
54
key areas where ‘things must go right’ for the business to flourish and
for the manager’s goals to be attained;
key areas of activity that should receive constant and careful attention
from management;
limited number of truly important areas that should be continually
measured on current performance;
‘factors’ that are ‘critical’ to the ‘success’ of the organisation.
From discussion above, it could be inferred that CSFs are a relative small
number of critical activities or areas that need to be controlled well in order to
deliver satisfied results to organisations. Only when this condition has been met,
organisations or companies will be able to achieve its goal and be successful. If
objectives of these factors are failed to achieve, it will lead to the failure of the
organisation, or even a catastrophe (Huotari and Wilson, 2001). As Caralli
(2004) has suggested, the power of CSFs lies in its ability to make these critical
factors explicit, which are difficult to be aware of only when problems arise,
even again and again. Thus, it would be very important and crucial for an
organisation or company to identify CSFs correctly in the procedure of control
and management according to its specific goals and missions.
Put in context of the study in CRM systems implementation, the concept of
CSFs could be defined as: ‘the few key activities or areas that must go right to
guarantee the successful implementation of CRM systems in organisations, and
further ensure the survival and success of the organisation in customer-centric
market’. Guided by this CSFs definition, the study adopted inductive research
methodology and tailored specific methods, CSFs method, case-study survey,
and desktop research, as demonstrated in the following sections.
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3.3 CSFs method
Information revolution during late 1970s and early 1980s resulted in the
rapid growth of various business information systems, which produced
tremendous amount of information for decision making than ever before (Caralli,
2004). Although the richness in information helped a lot in the management of
organisation, it also brought organisations in an information explosion world.
Senior executives then found themselves lost in too much data, reports, and felt
more difficult to determine where to concentrate.
To address the problem caused by information overload, Rockart (1979)
designs an approach to identify and create CSFs in a systematic way based on the
concept of CSFs – CSFs method. The CSFs method is initially developed for
individual managers to define their current significant information needs. The
main procedures are to conduct a series of in-depth interview sessions with each
manager to collect data, and subsequently decide key areas by analysing,
discussing the data. In this way, the huge amount of information produced by
company’s information systems could be reduced into few focus areas explicitly
presented to individual manager. According to these key areas, the manager
will be able to take good control of information, properly allocate resources, and
then realise individual goals in his/her professional work. This CSFs method is
utilised and demonstrated to be effective in his another research in understanding
the CSFs of the IS executives (Rockart, 1982).
Although Rockart’s method is mainly concerned with the information needs
of executives, he also indicates that it could be used to support industry’s success,
or used as a part of strategic planning for information systems. In their work,
Bullen and Rockart (1981) further specify these three major uses of the CSFs
concept more clearly, especially the last one. They are respectively explained
as: 1) to help an individual manager determine his/her information needs; 2) to
56
aid an organisation in its general planning process (strategic, long range and
annual planning); 3) to aid an organisation in its information systems planning
process. From hierarchical point of view, CSFs are divided into industry CSFs,
corporate CSFs, sub-organisation CSFs, and individual CSFs. The first two
uses are realised by adopting the hierarchical architecture and analysing CSFs in
a top-down manner. The last technique, on the contrary, gathers and determines
corporate CSFs in a bottom-up way for the organisation to identify elements
critical to system success and choose information systems accordingly.
Therefore the bottom-up procedure is suitable to find CSFs for the successful
implementation of CRM systems. The adapted method is illustrated in the
diagram below (Figure 5). As it shows, CSFs identified in each case study are
integrated to determine the final set of CSFs in CRM systems implementation.
Concept of case study and case-study survey are introduced in Section 3.4.
Rockart (1979) provides four prime sources of CSFs in the context of
industry and organisations, i.e. structure of the particular industry; competitive
strategy, industry position, and geographic location; environmental factors;
Figure 5 – CSF Procedure for Determining CSFs of CRM adapted from Bullen and Rockart (1981)
…
Case Study 1 Determine Individual
CSFs
Case Study 2 Determine Individual
CSFs
Case Study n Determine Individual
CSFs
Analyse Individual CSFs to Determine Global CSFs for CRM
57
temporal factors. It means CSFs of a specific company could be considered and
extracted from these four aspects. He also implies that sources to identify CSFs
could be adapted and developed basing on the manager’s own situation. As a
matter of fact, a variety of models to categorise primary sources of CSFs for the
success of information systems have been proposed by many researchers
afterwards (Griffin, 1995). Moreover, Caralli (2004) also states that in practice,
CSFs method has been widely adopted in many formalised information or
business systems, as well as other outside areas. Hence CSFs method is
suitable in a wide range of problem situations. As Griffin (1995:328) has
pointed out ‘the CSF approach is very broad and flexible’.
Depending on the interest of this research, the major sources of CSFs in
CRM system implementation were tailored as marketing, sales, and customer
service modules. In other words, these functional modules are the key focus
areas that were carefully checked in the study to identify CSFs.
Furthermore, Bullen and Rockart (1981) suggest a useful classification of
CSFs. They categorise each CSFs along three major dimensions. Since one
dimension is too complex and has little to do with the CSFs in this study
according to the focusing areas mentioned above, it will not be explained here.
The other two are 1) internal versus external, 2) monitoring versus
building-adapting. Internal CSFs deal with factors within the areas that can be
influenced and controlled by the manager and organisation. Conversely,
external CSFs indicate factors less under the manager’s control. Monitoring
CSFs are the areas requiring continued tracking and checking of current
situations. Building-adapting CSFs are more future-oriented. They are key
areas responsible for implementing change programmes to adapt organisations to
the perceived environment pressures. Based on the two dimensions, CRM
system implementation CSFs identified in the study were classified accordingly.
58
In short, this paper followed the CSFs approach as a generic guidance. By
examining each CRM system implementation case in marketing, sales, and
customer service modules, it identified the CSFs set and categorised them into
dimensions ‘internal vs external’ and ‘monitoring vs building-adapting’.
3.4 Case-study survey
For the concept of case study, Yin (2003:13,14) gives the definition as
follows:
‘A case study is an empirical inquiry that
investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context,
especially when
the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly
evident.’
Moreover, he indicates case studies are suitable to answer questions ‘how’
and ‘why’, and also to the situation when investigators can hardly control the
events.
The implementation of CRM systems is a contemporary phenomenon, and
could not be considered alone without a clear cognition of its interaction with the
contextual organisations or companies. In addition, the research focused on
‘how the CRM systems can be implemented successfully’, and ‘why the CSFs
identified in research can lead to success’. Also, researchers for each case
selected in this study generally were observers rather than controllers.
Therefore, for the investigation of each sample case about CRM implementation
in organisations, case study was a preferred method to be utilised.
59
However, the research did not adopt case study as a direct research approach.
Instead, it was adopted as a case-study survey (Bhandari et al., 2005). In
another words, it was to survey the findings of a set of case studies carried out by
previous researchers. In this sense, ‘case study’ did not mean a research method,
but a unit of analysis. Through critically analysing and evaluating these
secondary data, it was desired to make contribution to the studies of CRM
systems in both academic and practical fields.
The selection of sample case studies was very important, since it directly
affected the quality and representative of the data source. Thus the research
adopted criteria recommended by Bhandari et al. (2005).
Clear and descriptive;
Focus on features and functionalities, which have direct impact on the
implementation of CRM systems;
Findings are unbiased and supported by sound research framework.
At the same time, it is also recommended that a small amount of sample
case studies are preferred, since the research is particularly concerned with the
context it is conducted in. This characteristic is decided by the nature of case
study (as a research method) that has been discussed above, as well as the nature
of inductive approach that is detailed below.
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3.5 Inductive approach
According to Bryman (2001), inductive approach is to extract general
theories out of observations, which means it is a process from
observations/findings to theories. This research derived the theory, CSFs of
CRM implementation, from the survey and analysis of a variety of case studies.
Therefore inductive approach was the basic framework of this research’s
methodology. Moreover, the inductive framework was adapted to fit in this
research context, and had been applied to the case-study survey (Bhandari et al.,
2005).
Raise the research question;
Conduct a critical literature review on CRM systems, to provide a
theoretical background for the research;
Define the concept and characteristics of CSFs;
Identify and establish a set of key criteria, for verification and critical
analysis;
Identify and select a range of appropriate sample case-studies, according
to its validity, descriptive value and reliability;
Analyse and evaluate each case-study separately, under guidance of the
key criteria and the theoretical knowledge;
Develop a synthesis finding to all sample case-studies, as an answer to
the research question and theory extension in the field of CRM systems.
The framework is further illustrated in Figure 6 below. In this way, the
research had drawn an analytic generalisation of CSFs in the implementation of
CRM systems within similar circumstances – organisations or companies.
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3.6 Desktop research
Just as the name implies, desktop research means the research is conducted
on the desk, without real face-to-face contact with organisations or people. The
desktop research acted as a main method throughout the whole study. It was
adopted by two main areas of study: the literature review and case-study survey.
Literature review was conducted by critically reviewing and evaluating a
large number of literatures. They were mainly in theoretical background, but
were also involved in certain practical fields.
Research Question
Critical Literature Review
Define & Characterise CSFs
Establishing of Key Criteria
Case-Study Selection
Individual Case-Study Critical Analysis
Critical Review and Synthesis
Theory Extension
Figure 6 – Framework of a case-study survey inductive approach adapted from Galliers (1992:162), Bhandari et al. (2005:41).
Theory Building
Research Survey
62
Case-study survey was carried out by investigating cases on books,
documentations, Internet, which was all considered as secondary data.
Particularly speaking, sources of case studies were mainly from ‘claims of
different organisations’, with their corresponding ‘published and publicly
available case-studies’ (Bhandari et al., 2005:41). Therefore, rather than
theoretical data, the research would critically survey ‘non theoretical secondary
sources’. Furthermore, Remenyi et al. (1998:65) emphasise, ‘the literature
should be critically evaluated and not just accepted on face value’. Thus,
although case-study survey adopted desktop research method, it should and could
add values to current knowledge in CRM field through a critical insight of all the
information.
3.7 Research design
Based on the case study selection criteria, 8 case studies were finally
selected. There were banks, public sector, IT company, university, and
automotive manufacturer, which covered a wide range of industries. Countries
the organisations located in included UK, USA, Singapore, Finland, North
Ireland, and China. Therefore the case studies and CSFs resulted from were
multi-industry and multi-nationality in nature.
The key criteria for the analysis were derived from the main areas of CRM,
which were described in detail in literature review. The main areas were
organised together, and a model of CRM system was set up. As shown in
Appendix 1, it is represented in the form of two tables with three main parts,
marketing, sales and customer service modules. Each row represents a
functional component in that module. The column in each module and on the
left side of several rows means the main category of those functional components.
For example, in marketing module, Corporate Customer Management in the
column includes Customer Retention, Behaviour Prediction…until Customer
63
Privacy.
Moreover, there are three columns on the right, ‘Implemented’, ‘Success’,
and ‘Fail’. Each case study was analysed against the model, and the results
were recorded in these three columns. ‘Implemented’ means whether the CRM
system in the case had implemented particular functional component. ‘Success’
means the identified functional component was successfully implemented and
resulted in optimistic impact to the organisation. ‘Fail’ means the identified
functional component failed in the project and did not bring benefits to the
company. After the comparison against CRM model, each case study was
described and discussed in more detail in text in Chapter 4.
The discussion pattern for the 8 case studies followed a framework as
shown in Figure 7. Firstly, each case study was analysed individually, and was
discussed within the three modules respectively, marketing, sales, and customer
service. CSFs of CRM for each case were then derived in the context of that
case study. Secondly, when individual case analysis was finished, resulted
CSFs were combined according to the three modules. Overall CSFs for
marketing, sales, and customer service were then produced. Finally, global
CSFs for CRM system implementation were drawn from the three modules’
conclusion.
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3.8 Limitations
Although the research had referred to a considerable amount of literatures,
was carefully designed, and selected the most appropriate case studies within the
ability of the author, several limitations still could not be prevented.
First, the largest limitation was the comparatively short period of time.
Doing case-study survey was a time-consuming task. With the time constraint,
only 8 appropriate cases were able to be identified and analysed in time. Eight
case studies were the basic requirement in the number, lower than which would
not provide sufficient data. It was desirable to have more case studies to
analyse, if more time was available. Second, the CRM model used in the
analysis of case studies was only able to design in the three main areas, while
there were other more sophisticated models existed in literatures. Because of
…
…
Marketing
Sales
Cust Service
Cas
e St
udy
1
Cas
e St
udy
2
Cas
e St
udy
8 CSFs for
Case Study 1
CSFs for
Case Study 2
CSFs for
Case Study 8
Overall CSFs For Marketing
Overall CSFs For Sales
Overall CSFs For Cust Service
Global CSFs For CRM
Figure 7 – Framework for conducting CSFs method and case-study survey adapted from Bhandari et al (2005), Rockart (1981)
65
the limited time, the comparatively simple CRM model was adopted in the
research. Each case study was only examined in marketing, sales, and customer
service modules. Third, there were limitations in analysing case studies that
were done by previous researchers, which were secondary data. It was found
that reports about the case studies were not always quite fit in the purpose and
context of the research. As secondary data, it was inevitable to be blended in
previous researchers’ subjective data and information, which could influence the
validity of the survey results in this research. Finally, the research adopted an
inductive approach to build the theory about CSFs of CRM implementation, but
it did not have the step to validate or test the correctness of the CSFs found.
Hence it was also a limitation that findings of this research had not been
systematically tested.
3.9 Summary
To sum up, an inductive approach was adopted in the research. Through a
survey of previous empirical case studies, the research built up the theory about
critical success factors (CSFs) for organisations in CRM implementation. The
main concept utilised in the methodology was CSFs. Key methods adopted
respectively were CSFs method, case-study survey, and desktop research.
Basing on these methodology theories, the research was designed to examine 8
case studies in the three functional modules of CRM systems: marketing, sales,
and customer service. Finally, four kinds of limitations were identified in the
research.
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Chapter 4 Analysis and Findings
4.1 Introduction
This chapter presents the discussion and analysis of the 8 case study
selected. Each case study is introduced with its background, and analysed in
marketing, sales, and customer service modules. CSFs for individual cases are
subsequently identified in each section, and every case study ends with a short
conclusion.
4.2 Case study: Frontier Bank
4.2.1 Introduction and background
Organisation examined in this case study is a bank in the UK called Frontier
Bank, the name of which has been disguised. The bank launched and practised
a customer retention project, and the project was particularly aimed at its
telephone banking customers. The telephone banking service they offered was
named as Frontier Telephone Direct (FTD). Though the project was only
concerned with customer retention and telephone banking, it reflected a
proportion of CRM practice in organisation. Thus the case was worthy to be
analysed, and could be seen as the implementation of some specific functions in
CRM.
The promotion and implementation of FTD lasted for two-and-a half to
three years. On the whole, it was developed to attract new customers for FTD,
which was treated as an independent service provided by Frontier Bank. But it
also could act as an alternative choice for current customers. The FTD service
team was based at Frontier Bank’s national call-centre, and charged by its team
leader. The service was defined to serve FTD customers, and to take care of its
customers in every respect to keep them stay in relationships with the bank.
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4.2.2 Case study analysis Marketing
The functional components involved in FTD project carrying out marketing
responsibility could be referred to Appendix 2 in ‘Marketing’ row. As it
presents, Campaign Management and Customer Retention was involved in. At
the same time, authors of original case study also pointed out the necessity in
conducting Behaviour Prediction and Customer Value Modelling, which had not
been adopted in the project. Thus these areas were chosen as the focuses
examined and discussed in marketing functional module at Frontier Bank.
Functional parts in marketing module that were not discussed or mentioned in
original case study were labelled as ‘n/a’. Since no information or data was
provided, these areas were ignored in the analysis.
Campaign Management. According to the literature review above,
campaign management software addresses components of the full campaign
lifecycle, which include campaign definition, planning, customer segmentation,
scheduling, response management, and opt-in versus opt-out processing (Dyché,
2002). Examining the FTD project, the FTD team did not have a formal or
documented strategy, but the researchers of the case identified four major parts of
it. First, the FTD project was defined as a customer retention programme for its
own targeted customers, which were few from the bank’s existing customers.
The FTD team selected suitable customers according to explicit targeted
customer type and qualities, and recruited them through predefined filtering steps.
Second, it focused on providing flexible, ‘good services’ or ‘the right customer
services’ to keep customers’ loyalty, rather than had a specific retention
programme to follow. However, this still led to a relatively high satisfactory
rate and low defection rate. Third, the project managed customer responses
mainly from customer complaints. The team had a relatively effective
mechanism to manage and solve complaints and problems. Fourth, the bank
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started to analyse account closures in the middle of the project, and it proved to
be effective to enable the bank to clearly understand the reasons and impacts of
customer defection. As can be seen, campaign management in FTD project
covered most parts of campaign lifecycle except explicit scheduling and
comprehensive customer segmentation. Although no professional campaign
management applications was utilised, it was relatively successful and effective.
FTD’s customer satisfaction rate was 63 per cent in 1999; customer retention rate
was 83.5 per cent in 1999; cumulative 2.9 per cent accounts were closed
(defection rate) during 24 October 1995 and 13 June 1997; and only 1.9 per cent
of the total closed accounts were avoidable, which was the genuine defection
rate.
Customer Retention. According to the manager who was in charge of the
project, there was no real customer retention programme or activities for FTD.
Instead, they adopted strategy of providing the ‘best’ telephone banking services
through ‘the right customer service’. It means FTD provided services as good
as possible based on customers’ specific requirements, in order to make
customers satisfied. The bank assumed that satisfied customer would stay, and
use this method to maintain their loyalty. Thus customer retention in FTD was
reactive when customer called in, rather than a proactive service that the FTD
team contacts customers on their own initiative. At the same time, FTD did
in-depth work in analysing customer defection rate and categorising the reasons
why customers left. They divided the reasons into three types. One kind were
factors the bank could control and avoid; another were factors out of bank’s
control; and the last kind were FTD was willing to lose customers who were no
longer profitable. In this way, the FTD team could focus their efforts on the
first type of defection, and design counter measures to prevent it happening again.
The results proved that most of customers were loyal to their relationship with
the FTD service, and few of them had left the bank from 1995 to 1997.
Although the defection rate in 1999 was as high as 16.5 per cent, 80 per cent of
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the closed accounts were caused by the increase of tariff and a third of them were
unprofitable to be maintained.
Behaviour Prediction. As the researchers had pointed out in the case,
Frontier Bank did not try to figure out the ‘loyalty coefficient’ of its existing FTD
customers. Therefore the FTD team was not clear about the economic forces
that would cause the customer stay or leave. It implied FTD team had not
considered the necessity and method to foresee its customers’ behaviours. In
the case, the bank simply believed that they were selecting the right FTD
customers through the predefined filtering process. But a third in 16.5 per cent
customers who closed their accounts in 1999 were unprofitable. It means the
bank still selected 5.5 per cent customers that were not suitable for the FTD
services.
Customer Value Modelling. It had been indicated several times in the case
that Frontier Bank did not distinguish the profitable and unprofitable FTD
customers. They were treated as the same, no matter in the telephone banking
services, or complaint resolving. Only focusing on improving customers’
satisfaction did not mean the increase in profits, since it was suggested that some
satisfied customers might defect anyway. Hence it is more effective to put more
efforts into enhancing satisfactory levels of customers who are more profitable.
This then asks for the calculation and prediction of each customer’s profitability
or value to the bank in order to further differentiate services or products provided
to them.
Sales
In the sales module, there was explicit Sales Process/Activity Management
implemented in FTD project. Other functional components were not discussed
in the case.
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Sales Process/Activity Management. Dyché (2002) explains the full sales
cycle includes opportunity generated, lead allocated, prospect contacted, prospect
qualified, solution identified, and order placed. In the case, the process was
reflected in the selection and recruiting of new customers for FTD service. The
FTD team sent advertisements to targeted businesses, responded inquiries with
application forms, and finally processed applications to open FTD accounts after
verified applicants’ profiles. On the whole, this procedure had attracted,
identified and obtained qualified new customers for FTD service. The
relatively high customer retention rate and comparatively low customer defection
rate implied customers’ suitability to the FTD service.
Customer service
As can be seen in Appendix 2, FTD project were identified involving
Complaints Management, FAQs, and Customer Satisfaction Measurement in
customer service module. At the same time, it was pointed out the importance
of implementing Call-Scripting in the case study, which did not in FTD service.
Complaints Management. Frontier Bank addressed all complaints
immediately and stored the details of action taken in a computerised database.
The FTD teams produced lists of various types of complaints, reviewed them to
decide the causes and solutions, and finally took necessary corrective actions.
The result was optimistic: Frontier Bank received 93 complaints during 1996,
while the number reduced to 25 in the first half of 1997.
FAQs. In the complaints management procedures, the FTD team
developed a menu of standardised answers to frequently asked questions.
Though the article did not state these FAQs were on-line or not, it could be
inferred that it helped a lot no matter to the staff or customers depending on the
positive impact of complaints management above.
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Customer Satisfaction Measurement. Frontier Bank carried out postal
customer satisfaction surveys and obtained feedback through the FTD team. It
helped to respond its customer satisfaction level, and directed the bank to adapt
its services.
Call-Scripting. According to the case study, the FTD team did not capture
or record customer behavioural information for future relationship development
and marketing activities. Without the information, it would be difficult to
predict customers’ banking behaviours and may lose business opportunities.
4.2.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in FTD project, CSFs could
be concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Design marketing campaigns containing components in the full
campaign lifecycle;
2) Find out who might leave, who have left, and understand why, decide
how to prevent;
3) Manage relationships basing on customer’s qualities and behaviour
patterns.
Sales
1) Design sales process with clear goals (the most important thing in sales
activities is to clearly define the purpose, and then the following
processes can be planned accordingly).
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Customer service
1) Be reactive and proactive when providing customer services;
2) Differentiate services or products according to customer’s profitability
to the bank;
3) Manage customer complaints efficiently and effectively, and build
standardised solutions;
4) Conduct customer satisfaction survey periodically to improve services
accordingly;
5) Record and store customer behavioural information for future
marketing activities.
4.2.4 Conclusion
On the whole, the telephone banking project, Frontier Telephone Direct
(FTD), launched by Frontier Bank was successful. The planning and goals of
the service were relatively clear, the customer-centric culture had been already
built among the FTD staff, and they also had developed effective customer
feedback systems. These then led to improvement in customer satisfaction and
high customer retention rate during the project.
However, the FTD team did little in studying and analysing their customers.
They tended to treat all the target customers as ‘a single homogeneous group’,
rather than differentiating services according to each customer’s value to the
bank. Therefore, although customers were generally satisfied with the service
and willing to stay loyal, the increase of profits obtained was not as obvious as
the enhancement of customer retention. Of course, it also related to the bank’s
comparatively low service charges. Thus keeping customer behaviour and
business records to analyse customer segmentation and their corresponding
profitability were potential areas that the FTD team could consider to develop in
the future.
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4.3 Case study: Parish National Bank (PNB)
4.3.1 Introduction and background
Parish National Bank (PNB) is a small local commercial bank. Its
branches were distributed in eight locations, and operated in four parishes within
60 miles of New Orleans, USA. It owned an asset of $280 million, and planned
to increase the number to $500 million by 2007. As a small community bank,
PNB emphasised personal service, character lending and community
involvement. Several other community banks also existed in the areas where
PNB’s market was residing, the competition was therefore extremely fierce.
Every local bank was aggressively looking for growth.
Facing a competitive market, PNB defined its desired competitive position
was a high touch and high tech local bank. It emphasised qualified customer
relationships, valuable, innovative products reflecting the leading edge, and
information-enhanced products. The short-term objective was to grow
businesses through new branches, innovative products, Web banking, and
improved sales culture. The targeted customers of PNB were small businesses
and small business employees.
Again this case study did not express explicitly that it was about the
planning and deployment of CRM systems, but its business practices were
mainly concerned with developing and executing a successful strategy for
customer service and target marketing. Therefore the case of PNB was much
relevant to CRM implementation, and was investigated to identify useful
information.
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4.3.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
Four types of functional components implemented in marketing module of
PNB were identified and presented in Appendix 3. All of them had received
satisfactory results. On the other hand, Behaviour Prediction function was
pointed out not been carried out sufficiently in the original case study.
Campaign Management. The good campaign management of PNB was
represented by its successful execution of a series of strategies. Surrounding
the focus of providing high touch and high technology services to the targeted
small businesses, five different strategies were conducted respectively. First,
the bank implemented its high touch strategy. PNB improved the appearance
and decoration of the bank, in order to provide its customers a more comfortable
and beautiful environments. It then put great efforts into training employees.
They were required to greet customers politely and treat them as guests, in order
to develop personal relationships. Second, PNB implemented its high tech
strategy by developing Internet-based banking services. Except standard
Internet banking services, e.g. bill paying, balance checking, the bank also
offered several functions other banks did not have, e.g. e-Register. It provided
more transaction flexibility to its customers electronically. Third, in the
implementation of target marketing, PNB had very clear idea about its focus
groups were small businesses, small business owners, and small business
employees. But it seemed that the bank had not created systematic ways to
understand and serve the targeted customers. It only maintained customer
relationships through social bonds, which was identified as a part of high touch
strategy by authors of the case study. Fourth, PNB adopted an improvisational
campaign reacting to the changes of other community banks. Through
informing customers owning accounts of those community banks changes were
taking place, PNB suggested them to choose new banks. In this way, PNB
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successfully obtained new customers from one of these banks. Fifth, the
management changed PNB’s growth strategy of opening new branches from in a
new and most competitive region to in areas where they already had businesses
in. It was in consideration of the bank’s resources were not enough to enter new
market, which would be very costly. In short, all the marketing campaigns had
received reasonably good results. As the digits given in the case study, the
performance of PNB was almost consistently improved during the past three-year
period. At the same time, PNB was able to initiate campaign strategies basing
on its own needs, as well as to develop and change activities in reaction of its
competitors and the markets.
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling. PNB conducted the high touch strategy to
improve, track and evaluate the quality of customer services. To balance the
expenses on it, the bank in turn charged customers very high fees. In addition,
it also promoted products that encouraged customers to use fee-paid services,
such as customers had to pay for the access to several useful information of the
balance. These measures could be seen as up-selling that PNB encouraged its
customers to purchase high value services, and they could result in the
improvements in customer profitability to the bank.
Customer Retention. The success of building customer relationships and
maintain existing customers was represented by the high touch strategy in target
marketing. With the target of small businesses, PNB’s employees paid much
attention to social relationships with them. They knew customers, customers’
families, and built and kept strong social bonds, especially in the more rural
parishes. PNB managers were very active in local communities. Hence the
good customer relationships enabled the bank to have active interaction between
them, and finally keep its local customers.
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Behaviour Prediction. In the case study, it was criticised that PNB did
little to find out what new technology products were needed by its small business
customers, especially to develop new Web-based financial services. In fact, the
bank once assigned an external marketing company to do the needs research, but
no primary research was done. As a result, it became the weakness
acknowledged by the bank, and needed to be solved in the future. According to
literature review in Chapter 2, this kind of analysis belongs to the
‘propensity-to-buy analysis’, which is to understand what products a particular
customer is likely to purchase. Therefore, as Appendix 3 shows, Behaviour
Prediction was considered that had not been implemented. PNB should put
more efforts into identifying and determining target customers’ needs in the
following work.
Personalisation. PNB was appraised had done a good job in Internet-based
banking services. As mentioned above, the Web site includes standard Internet
banking services, as well as certain services that were not available at other
community banks. Thus the bank kept a high level of personalisation for
existing customers, and provided certain levels of innovations to attract new
customers and retain current ones at the same time.
Sales
In sales module, researchers of the case study pointed out a good practice
concerning Lead Management. On the other hand, they also criticised the
PNB’s weakness in Contact Management.
Contact Management. In the implementation of target marketing, though
strong personal relationships with small businesses were successfully built,
managers or employees were unable to identify which part of PNB’s sales was
related to small businesses. Later, PNB found that relevant information was
actually available, but obviously had not been requested or used. This should
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be attributed to the poor management of customer data and information, which
could be solved by contact management. Sales staff and managers should
continuously input, update and track sales activities based on each customer.
Only in this way, the sales performances could be evaluated, refined in the future,
and the bank can solve problems for customers in time.
Lead Management. PNB identified sales opportunities by reacting to the
acquisition movements taken by its competitor banks. It adopted a kind of
market hunter software programme to find out customers having the competitor
banks’ accounts, and determined them as target customers. PNB then executed
a direct mail campaign telling target customers their accounts in those banks
were due to change, and encouraged them to rethink the choice of the banks.
This campaign was very successful to gain customers from one out of the two
competitor banks. PNB also analysed reasons why one was more effective than
the other. In this activity, the bank identified an excellent business opportunity
from its competitors’ movements. With the assistance of particular software
tool and account information, it found out target customers, which helped the
campaign to be carried out correctly and effectively.
Customer service
When concerned with customer service perspective, PNB did well in
Workforce Management, but failed to set up an effective customer feedback
mechanism related to Customer Satisfaction Measurement.
Workforce Management. Workforce management mentioned here is not
relevant to the contact centre, but it could be regarded as workforce management
in a general meaning. PNB conducted extensive trainings to new and existing
employees through high levels of formal and informal communications.
Employees’ bonuses on top of basic salary were directly related to their
performance in customer service and sales. Through these measures, the bank
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created very strong social bonds with its customers.
Customer Satisfaction Measurement. According to the case study, PNB
neither measured satisfaction level of the targeted small businesses, nor
compared its own performance with competitors in this area. It is said that,
without consistent customer feedback systems, the niche strategy would be very
difficult to carry out.
4.3.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in PNB, CSFs could be
concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Be clear about the goals of marketing campaigns, and conduct them
part by part;
2) Be clear about who the target customers are;
3) Develop systematic procedures to identify and determine target
customers’ preference and needs;
4) Consider business environments and resources the organisation has,
when making decisions to expand markets.
Sales
1) Retain and track useful information about customers and specific sales
activities related to them;
2) Be reactive to competitors’ recent movements, and correctly identify
target customers the lead may point to.
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Customer service
1) Implement extensive employee trainings and incentive measures to
improve customer service and sales;
2) Build up consistent customer feedback mechanisms to track customer
satisfaction level and help in decision-making;
3) Create and maintain close social ties with target customers through
personal interaction with the customer and people related to them;
4) Develop personalised and innovative Web-based services to maintain
existing customers and attract new customers.
4.3.4 Conclusion
To conclude, Parish National Bank (PNB) was good at making appropriate
marketing strategies and properly implementing marketing campaigns. The
bank had put a lot of efforts into improving its own ability in customer service
and sales. The management also understood how to react to the competitive
environments and decidedly made effective marketing strategy accordingly.
But PNB was generally short in understanding its customers. It neither
collected or analysed customer data and information from daily work, nor set up
effective and sustained customer feedback mechanism to track the satisfaction
level. This would be dangerous for the bank with its development, because its
target customers were not studied and hence were not understood. The bank
might have no idea about how to satisfy and further retain them by providing
appropriate services. Therefore it must be addressed as soon as possible.
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4.4 Case study: the Housing and Development Board (HDB)
4.4.1 Introduction and background
The Housing and Development Board (HDB) was founded in 1960 as a
government agency, which is responsible for providing affordable housing for the
public. Statistics shows that there are around 85% of the population in
Singapore living in HDB apartments. Additionally, HDB also supplies services
dealing with the allocation and management of HDB properties, in order to
cultivate community cohesion. To its own organisation, the goal is to develop
as a learning organisation that can inspire creativity and develop the employees.
Before the implementation of CRM, HDB had already had some
stand-alone operational systems (e.g. sales, resales) in the 1980s, and further
developed and integrated corporate databases and applications in the 1990s,
which was called Information System Plan (ISP). On the 5th of November
2001, the agency decided to implement CRM architecture throughout the
organisation. HDB is a service-oriented organisation and it mainly focuses on
providing excellent services to customers. Therefore the organisational goal is
to ensure its products and services can deliver superior quality and affordability.
To assist the realisation of the goal, CRM was adopted as a strategic tool to better
understand its customers and increase service levels by enhancing customer
satisfaction and reducing operational costs.
According to the introduction in the case study, HDB is consistently
acknowledged as ‘a model organization in IT implementation’ (pp.2). It has
successfully implemented business process reengineering, data warehouse,
knowledge management, and CRM. With its powerful IT background and
approved success in CRM, HDB is therefore an excellent case study in the field
of CRM implementation. At the same time, since HDB is a public sector
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organisation in Singapore, the nature of the CRM developed is more
service-oriented and less revenue-oriented. It is where this case study is
different from previous case studies describing private sectors, which should also
be noticed.
4.4.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
As can be seen in Appendix 4, CRM in HDB successfully implemented
three functional components in marketing module.
Campaign Management. With the powerful customer data collection and
analysis ability of CRM in HDB, business analysts could better plan, monitor and
analyse business activities as well as propose policy changes. For example,
what designs of housing would better address customer needs or be more
attractive to customers. Therefore HDB’s campaign management relied heavily
on customer data and its analytical tools, which provided in-depth insights into
customers for management to improve the plan work of its services.
Behaviour Prediction. According to the literature review, behaviour
prediction is mainly responsible for understanding customers, and utilises
existing customer information to make various predictions. In the HDB case,
the organisation put great efforts into developing rich and consistent customer
database as the foundation supporting staff to better understand their customers.
It was first represented in HDB’s careful development in customer information.
Based on a ready database of customer information started from Information
System Plan (ISP) in the 1990s and the data warehouse completed in 1996,
customer information was categorised into three basic types: customer data
(name, age, sex, address, etc.), business transaction (housing loans, sales, etc.)
and interaction history (when a customer wrote to HDB, called HDB, paid a visit
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to HDB, etc.). The data and information was all stored in the customer
information database, providing a convenient and integrated access to it. Hence
it enabled the organisation to better analyse and understand its customers’ needs
and preference, and further customise corresponding services for them.
Channel Optimisation. HDB supplied its customers a variety of channels
to interact directly with the organisation. The channels included ‘face-to-face’,
‘telephone’, ‘web’, ‘e-mail’, ‘fax’ and so on. In this way, customers could
choose the most convenient or their preferred channels to communicate and
interact with HDB.
Sales
As mentioned above, HDB did not quite focus on generating revenues.
Thus no obvious functional component was identified had been implemented in
the sales module. Information was not available here.
Customer service
Customer service was the area HDB paid much attention to. Except Field
Force Automation, its customer service module involved all the other three main
kinds of applications as presented in the table.
Contact Centre. Because HDB was a service-oriented public sector
organisation, its contact centre appeared to be stronger than only to support
telephone service. Therefore contact centre was discussed independently from
the existing categories in Appendix 4. The most outstanding characteristic of
HDB’s customer service systems was the one-stop customer service portal for
internal staff. The portal integrated various systems and information throughout
the whole organisation, and hence was able to help customer service officers
(CSOs) to provide efficient and customised customer services. Specifically, the
portal linked to legacy application systems that contained a huge amount of
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customer and business information over time; it combined with the traditional
and IP-based telephony systems to offer most updated customer information
from customers’ contacts to HDB; and it also cooperated with knowledge
management systems, which supplied customised information and displayed
them in a certain format enabling CSOs to correctly answer queries and share
their experiences. In this way, HDB had realised the 360-degree view of its
customers, which was always emphasised in CRM literatures. At the same, the
one-stop information access point was very important to the users. It not only
increased customer service staff’s efficiency, but also made it possible for them
to provide highly personalised and consistent services with high quality to each
customer.
Call Routing. Through a voice communication system called the ‘pure IP
solution’, HDB was enabled to share call centre functions among branch offices
and the headquarters. It involved features like interactive voice response (IVR)
and intelligent call routing to the CSO anywhere in the organisation who is first
available to the customer. Because of the integrated system, the public was able
to access different units of the organisation by a single telephone number. They
no longer had to dial different phone numbers in order to get through different
services at HDB. Therefore the system improved HDB’s customer services in
both efficiency and quality.
Call-Scripting. Call-scripting provided by HDB was not the typical
applications supporting call centres mentioned in the literature review. Rather,
it contained several systems that kept and tracked customer interactions with the
organisation. In this sense, it had broader contents than call-scripting, which
could be temporarily named as ‘touchpoints-scripting’ in the case. Specifically,
it indicated the front office systems at HDB. HDB staff used the systems when
they were providing services to customers. A case in point was the
correspondence management system, which was responsible for managing and
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tracking the correspondence from the public. Through the system, customers’
interactions with the organisation were recorded and could be referred to when
the same customer contacts HDB. Another example was the enquiry counter
system, which was used by HDB staff that served customers coming to the
premises of the organisation. Through the central customer database, the
system could provide consistent answers to customers’ enquiries. Thus it
helped the organisation to build a unified image among its customers.
Furthermore, as mentioned in ‘Behaviour Prediction’ above, interaction history
was stored in the customer information database as a part of customer profile.
Therefore customers’ interaction and contacts with HDB were effectively
monitored and tracked, which made it possible for the staff to provide high
quality and consistent services to customers.
Web-based Self-service. Except for the E-mail Contact, Web-based
self-service features mentioned in the case study could not be explicitly
categorised into the other three types in the table. Hence it was first discussed
as an integrated functional component in customer service module. HDB
adopted a Web portal, ‘InfoWEB’, for the public to access information and
services of the organisation. It was a customer community portal that assisted
HDB to acquire, serve and retain customers. The portal published necessary
information about sales, housing procedures, housing offers, HDB projects and
so on. It also supported several on-line transaction services enabling
customers to do transactions, pay fees, and submit applications at their own
convenient time. As stated in the case study, the Web portal functioned as ‘the
gateway for customers to access information and transact electronically with
HDB’ (pp.8). Compared with the one-stop customer service portal for internal
employees discussed above, the Web portal could be seen as a customer portal
offering external customers a one-stop information access point. Because of
its one-stop and on-line nature, it greatly enhanced the efficiency, convenience
and flexibility for customers to obtain services independently, which could thus
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lead to greater customer satisfaction.
E-mail Contact. As mentioned in Channel Optimisation above, customers
were enabled to contact HDB by e-mail. Therefore E-mail Contact was one
channel for customers to interact with the organisation.
Customer Satisfaction Measurement. The case study did not clearly
indicate whether HDB had developed systematic ways in customer satisfaction
measurement. But it presented a customer satisfaction survey after the
implementation of CRM systems in the organisation. The ratios of customers
who were satisfied with HDB’s counter, telephone, and correspondence services
were respectively 100%, 98%, and 97%. As can be seen, the implementation
of CRM was very successful. However, if HDB had not built a consistent
customer feedback mechanism yet, it should consider this for future
development.
4.4.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in HDB, CSFs could be
concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Provide powerful customer data collection and analysis ability;
2) Store categorised customer information in a central and enterprise-wide
database to prevent data duplication and inconsistency.
Sales
Not available.
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Customer service
1) Provide a one-stop information access portal for customer service staff,
which integrates enterprise-wide customer information and application
systems;
2) Provide a one-stop information access portal for external customers to
obtain different services and information from the organisation,
usually on the Web and in the call centre;
3) Allow customer service staff to easily store, update and track customer
data and interaction information in a central database at real time when
they are providing customer services;
4) Build a consistent customer feedback mechanism to continuously
measure customer satisfaction level and further improve customer
services;
5) Provide multiple channels for customers to choose when they want to
contact the organisation.
4.4.4 Conclusion
To sum up, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) implemented its
CRM systems successfully. As a public sector organisation in Singapore,
HDB’s CRM was more service-oriented. It was different from common CRM
in business companies, which was normally more revenue-oriented. Therefore
the case study was an excellent CRM successful implementation case in both
marketing and customer service modules. The major strongpoint of HDB’s
CRM was it did well in developing integrated access points for both customer
service staff and customers, and supporting these applications with a central and
enterprise-wide database. It also supported multi-channel access for its
customers.
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What HDB should pay attention to is the need for a consistent customer
feedback mechanism, which is also very important to any organisation adopting
CRM systems. When the organisation is clear about customers’ attitudes to the
services or products, it can make adaptations to further address customers’ needs
and preferences.
4.5 Case study: Tieto-X Plc
4.5.1 Introduction and background
Tieto-X Plc is a leading contract work solutions company specialising in IT
expertise in Finland. According to IT services that agreed in the contract, the
company sends out software designers and programmers to the client’s premises,
and work in the client’s IT development project. Therefore the nature of IT
services provided by Tieto-X requires the company to keep in touch and
cooperate closely with its customers.
Tieto-X was established in 1995. The Company had its headquarters
located in Helsinki, and six branches distributed in other areas of Finland. It
had employees near to 270 people. Since its foundation, Tieto-X had grown at a
similar or even faster speed than many other global and domestic IT companies.
During 2000 and 2002, the company expanded rapidly by acquiring several large
IT expertise companies. The mergers brought Tieto-X different company
cultures, concepts and business processes; whilst existing applications were not
flexible enough to adapt the rapid development. In order to unify the
differences and adapt changes, the company decided to entirely renew both
financial and operational systems. On the other hand, the company had reached
to its best performance with annual revenue of 21.39 million EUR in 2001. But
the figure reduced to 17.3 million EUR in 2002, because of a decline in the
demands of IT services nationwide and worldwide. Thereby Tieto-X had to
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transform from an order intake organisation to a customer-centric one.
Combining these two factors, the implementation of CRM was adopted as a
subset of the system renewal project.
The CRM system was packaged software bought from a software vendor
and was linked to another two systems, HRM and financial systems, to form the
integrated corporate systems, especially a consolidated customer data
management system. The project of the CRM system implementation began in
2002, and was finally fully functioned in use in September 2003. Both
operational and analytical functionalities of CRM were implemented in the
project. Through the CRM system, Tieto-X had successfully transformed into a
customer-oriented IT service company. Hence it was selected as a successful
CRM implementation case to study and discuss.
4.5.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
In Appendix 5, the shaded area means no explicit subset function in
‘Corporate Customer Management’ was able to identify. Thus it was discussed
independently as a high-level category here. As illustrated in the table, the
shaded area represents Tieto-X Company mainly focused on Corporate Customer
Management in its CRM project, and the implementation result was successful.
Corporate Customer Management. Tieto-X utilised a single CRM
database to store all the data and information of its customers. It included both
inbound and outbound transaction histories of all customers, e.g. sales and
service contacts, offers, contracts, past sales history, etc. The case emphasised
that with the development of external economic environments, customers’ buying
power had increased. As a result, they required the service provider, which was
Tieto-X in this case, to carry more business risk. In this situation, the single
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central CRM database storing all the transaction information concerned with
existing customer relationships played a crucial role in systematically managing
customers of the company. It provided Tieto-X with consistent and
comprehensive customer data accumulated over time, which assisted the
company to better understand its customers and decrease the business risk it
might venture.
Sales
Sales module was the area where Tieto-X made great efforts. The
company first emphasised the use of sales pipeline management, which was also
called ‘Lead Management’ in the model of this research. It then made some
significant rearrangement in sales force, which was known as the ‘Sales and
Territory Management’. In addition, Knowledge Management was also
identified, which was only briefly mentioned in the original case study.
Lead Management. According to the requirement of a single customer
data repository, salespeople were requested to store all customer orders/contracts
and offers in the same database of CRM system. In this way, the company was
enabled to produce a pipeline sales report reporting total sales value of contracts
on stock, sales estimations, a timeline, and various sales figures per annual
quarter. These figures could also be compared with corresponding figures in
the same period of previous years. In short, CRM system could apply business
intelligence in sales pipeline management helping the organisation to make right
decisions and predict sales opportunities, based on the share of rich customer
data in the CRM database.
Sales and Territory Management. Since the transformation from a
product-oriented company to a customer-focused one had taken place, Tieto-X
had reconstructed its internal structure. Different customer segments were
developed and divided, and each business unit was allocated with one to be
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responsible for. Moreover, each salesperson was assigned with specific
customer relationships and branches of industry. Salespeople were then
required to be more active to contact both new customers and existing clients.
More new contracts with new and old customers should be created, rather than
relying on existing customers and long-lasting contracts. At the same time, the
maintenance of current customer relationships was still mandatory. The ways
of sales staff to conduct their work were also changed. They needed to store all
their customer contracts in the central database for the company to track
individual performances. If sales estimation displayed in the pipeline sales
report were not optimistic enough, the salespeople would not be awarded an
advance payment of future bonuses. In this way, the incentive programme of
sales staff was changed too. Therefore, the job descriptions of salespersons
were successfully adapted to the implementation of CRM system and company’s
transformation into a customer-centric organisation. Tieto-X hence successfully
reconstructed its sales force for the CRM project.
Knowledge Management. In the case study, it mentioned that the company
provided a new product/service portfolio for its sales staff. Thus it could be
inferred that Tieto-X also armed the sales force with several company’s
knowledge to base on, when they were contacting with their clients.
Customer service
There was no obvious description or discussion related to customer service
module in the CRM system of Tieto-X, so information was not available here.
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4.5.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in Tieto-X Plc, CSFs could
be concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Provide a single central repository to store all the data and information
of the organisation’s customers, including both inbound and outbound,
static and dynamic histories.
Sales
1) Centralise customer sales information in the same repository and
deduce useful figures for further decision-making and opportunity
prediction;
2) Make sure exact target customer allocations to specific business units
and individuals, for the whole organisation to be more
customer-focused;
3) Be active in the interaction with customers, in order to create new
customers and retain existing customers more effectively;
4) Store all the customer sales information in the same database, enabling
the management to track, monitor and evaluate sales activities and
performances on both corporate and individual levels;
5) Provide sales force with a unified and handy knowledge base to assist
their interaction with customers.
Customer service
Not available.
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4.5.4 Conclusion
In sum, Tieto-X Plc successfully transformed itself from a product-oriented
IT service company to a customer-focused company. The sales culture became
more active in the creation and maintenance of customer relationships. The
organisation also adopted a central customer database to store all the personal
and business information about customers, which enabled the management of
sales activities from both corporate and individual levels.
From the case, it could be seen clearly that Tieto-X still focused more on
sales than other two modules, especially less on customer service. As an
organisation armed with real CRM, customer service is the area that can never be
ignored. On the contrary, it is the area where requires to put much more efforts
and investments. Therefore Tieto-X should consider more about further
improvement in customer service in the future development.
4.6 Case study: International Business Machines Corp. (IBM)
4.6.1 Introduction and background
International Business Machines Corp. is a worldwide well known IT
service and manufacture company in the USA, and its abbreviation ‘IBM’ may
be more familiar to the public. Between the 1960s and 1970s, IBM could
generate steady revenues from its commanding market share of mainframe
computers. From the 1980s, the emergence of smaller, cheaper and networked
computers gave customers more choices, and made IT market more and more
competitive. The market share owned by IBM decreased from 30% to 19%
during 1986 and 1992, and each percentage point represented US$3 billion in
revenues.
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With the declining in demand and customer loyalty, by the mid-1990s, IBM
began to rethink the way they managed customer relationships. It then started a
4-year initiative to reengineer its CRM process and capitalise on its
knowledge-based resources. The initiative was first conducted in the
company’s division of AS/400 computer systems, and it produced a prototype
called ‘Inside IBM’. It combined the advantages of multi-media electronic
channels and IBM’s powerful knowledge base in the prototype, and successfully
improved the company’s relationship with its customers and business partners.
After the success of the pilot study of Inside IBM, the prototype and its concept
were adopted by the whole organisation and evolved as the ‘e-Services’ of IBM.
Based on the established architecture of CRM solution, IBM was still refining
and exploring more efficient and effective ways to support and interact with its
customers.
The original case study discussed the 4-year initiative and the followed pilot
test of Inside IBM in much detail. Although it was only an experimental
solution at the early stage of IBM’s exploration of CRM, it had established the
essential concept and structure for the future work. Therefore it was valuable to
be examined, and then it was selected as one of the case studies in this research.
4.6.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
As can be seen in Appendix 6, two functional components were identified in
marketing module, and they all belonged to Corporate Customer Management.
Customer Retention. Although specific process conducted for customer
retention was in fact before the design of Inside IBM, it was a part of the whole
corporation’s CRM strategy. Thus the marketing survey to understand AS/400
customers could be regarded as a functional component of the CRM strategy.
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There were 58 AS/400 customers selected as a sample in the survey. It aimed to
find out customers’ current frustrations or ‘points of pain’ in their interactions
with IBM. The results revealed that existing communication methods and
sources were not reliable and often inaccessible. To enhance customer
satisfaction, IBM needed to provide more marketing support and be more
proactive on behalf of the customers. Having gained the understanding of target
customers, the task force responsible for reengineering customer relationships
then began to design a new CRM process and electronic system Inside IBM.
The final results showed that execution of the redesigned CRM process and
system addressed customers’ ‘points of pain’, and was very successful. Thereby
understanding target customers deeply helps a lot in retaining them.
Channel Optimisation. Because different customers might have different
communication preferences and need different degrees of support, Inside IBM
was designed specially taking customers’ flexibility in use of the system into
consideration. For example, some customers might prefer self-service on the
Web, and some would prefer to contact directly with IBM subject matter experts.
In this situation, Inside IBM would automatically route all the requests to the
appropriate places. In order to minimise the costs, most requests were resolved
by predefined procedures or guided to company’s knowledge bases, before they
reached to the human experts. Real human assistance was the last option in the
chain, which meant it was offered to customers who really needed it. In this
way, customers were supplied with various communication channels according to
their preferences, and they could control as much of the interaction as possible.
At the same time, IBM was enabled to reduce its costs in serving customers by
optimising multiple interaction channels.
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Sales
As it shows in the original case study, Knowledge Management was a
powerful tool leveraged in IBM’s CRM initiative. However, what should be
noticed was that it was not only limited in the sales module as a part of sales
force automation. Thus it was labelled in the existing CRM model in Appendix
6, but was discussed further in other modules when related.
Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management was the functional
component that was always put in the central focus of the CRM strategy in IBM.
But function and concept of the knowledge management in Inside IBM project
were much wider than its original definition in sales module described in the
literature review. The knowledge-based resources were accessible to both
customers and IBM’s workforce. To customers, the knowledge was provided to
help them get support from IBM and solve their problems. To IBM’s staff, the
knowledge could improve their ability to make right decisions and serve
customers when requested. The utilisation of knowledge-based resources was
actually dispersed more in customer service module, hence it was introduced and
discussed in detail in the subsequent module.
Customer service
In the area of customer service, Contact Centre and Web-based Self-service
were the two major parts focused in Inside IBM. Functional component
Call-Scripting was further identified in Contact Centre, while no individual part
could be found in Web-based Self-service as represented by the shaded area.
Additionally, Customer Satisfaction Measurement was also carried out after the
pilot study.
Contact Centre. Similar to the case of HDB, contact centre in the CRM
initiative of IBM offered the customer service personnel with a single access
point. The internal interface could be customised by the staff, and the
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application was established based on a common customer database. All the
data and information about customers and their interaction with the company
were modified, updated and stored in the same customer database. Hence it
gave human experts a unified view of each customer by providing
comprehensive and consistent customer data. Furthermore, human experts were
enabled to share the view of the same customer. When a customer’s query was
passed from one expert to another, it could create a smooth transfer. The
customer would not need to repeat his/her personal data or questions again and
again. Therefore the design of single interface based on single customer
database in Inside IBM could greatly improve customer service staff’s efficiency
and accuracy as well as customer satisfaction.
Call-Scripting. Inside IBM helped to create customer profiles by entering,
updating and maintaining necessary information when customers interacted with
the system. When requested by the customer service staff, all the information
would be displayed on the single interface instantaneously. As defined in Inside
IBM, customer profiles included firm and industry demographics, contact names,
entitlement information, and general product interests. Except the basic
information about customers, Inside IBM was also able to collect and assemble
other useful customer data, information, and knowledge, which was also through
customers’ interactions with the system. Moreover, customers’ problems were
mainly caused by products they purchased, so having good understanding and
management of assets installed at customers’ premises would be essential to
address the queries. Based on this, Inside IBM developed a more advanced
call-scripting function to help customers solve product problems, diagnostic
intelligence. The diagnostic device resided in customers’ products, and enabled
Inside IBM to obtain ‘vital product data’ electronically and automatically
whenever the customer started to interact with it. Example ‘vital product data’
were system configuration and performance data, Machine types, model numbers,
rack and network configurations, software and release information, etc. These
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data were then linked and stored in an existing database ‘RETAIN’ (Remote
Technical Assistance and Information Network). RETAIN kept information of
each problem, diagnosis, and subsequent fix of the machines many years, hence
it could heuristically diagnose problems and provide appropriate solutions to
human experts, by requests of the data transmitted in that were concerned with
newly emerging problems. The database was even able to predict hardware and
software problems that tend to happen before they actually occurred, by applying
sophisticated data mining to the collective data of multiple customers. With the
assistance of sufficient and immediate information, e.g. the customer’s profile,
current system information, diagnostic information, recommended solutions, etc.,
a human expert could quickly engage in a customer’s inquiry. Combining
call-scripting technologies above, staff could provide efficient and proactive
customer services by remotely predicting and solving problems. They in turn
could improve the effectiveness of targeted sales and marketing.
Web-based Self-service. The Web site provided the registered customers
with a single point-of-entry interface connecting to IBM’s Intranet and
cross-functional back-end services on a 24-hour 7-day access base. The
interface aggregated a variety of information and knowledge resources located in
different departments in IBM, e.g. announcements, educational services, product
information, order fulfilment, links to business partners, and other services.
Thus customers could easily search for and find out needed information and
knowledge, through the clear and integrated guidance on the Web site. The
mass customised front-end interface supported interactive data, voice, and image
connections to IBM. A video connection would be realised later on, when
higher Internet connection speed was available. In this way, the mass
customised front-end interface provided customers with an efficient and accurate
information access point and active two-way interaction with IBM.
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Customer Satisfaction Measurement. After implementing Inside IBM for
6 months, the task force conducted a survey and interviews among target
customers. The results showed Inside IBM had effectively addressed
customers’ ‘points of pain’ and greatly improved customer satisfaction levels. It
also indicated that the concept and processes of Inside IBM were necessary and
crucial for IBM’s future direction in customer relationship building and
maintaining. Through the measurement of target customer satisfaction levels,
IBM could make corresponding adjustments and had recognised the ways to
further improve customer relationships.
4.6.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in IBM, CSFs could be
concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Gain deep understanding of target customers, e.g. aspects they are
satisfied or dissatisfied with, in order to adopt corresponding
movements to address problems, improve satisfaction and finally keep
them stay;
2) Allow customers to control and customise the ways of interaction
according to their needs and preferences;
3) Enable company to automatically route customers’ requests towards the
company’s favoured way, e.g. minimise the costs by reducing
customers’ accesses to human staff.
Sales
1) Provide knowledge-based resources to support both external customers
and internal staff.
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Customer service
1) Provide a single and sharable access point (interface) based on a single
customer database for customer service staff, to ensure the consistency
and accuracy of their services;
2) Collect and assemble each customer’s data, information and knowledge
when he/she interacts with the company, and can provide them
immediately to the staff when serving that particular customer;
3) Collect and assemble company’s product, problem and corresponding
fix information from customers, by applying techniques like data
mining to predict customer problems that might occur and recommend
appropriate solutions efficiently and proactively;
4) Provide a single customisable entry point (interface) for customers to
easily access organisation’s various knowledge-based resources and
cross-functional back-end services, in order to ensure customers receive
efficient, consistent and accurate support from the company;
5) Develop effective customer feedback mechanism to continuously
evaluate existing processes and improve future activities in CRM.
4.6.4 Conclusion
In order to improve relatively poor relationships with customers, IBM
started an initiative ‘Inside IBM’ to reengineer CRM process. Inside IBM
provided an integrated interface for customers’ interaction with the company, and
enabled customers to communicate directly with IBM’s Intranet and backend
cross-functional knowledge-based resources. It also enabled the company to
collect customer usage information, e.g. product configuration data and
performance data, to remotely manage products and diagnose problems in
customers’ premises. The technology innovation had differentiated its customer
services from other competitors’. In this way, the system successfully
addressed areas where customers were dissatisfied and effectively improved
customer satisfaction. More importantly, it provided IBM with a correct
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direction for future customer relationships’ building and maintaining.
The case study did not provide IBM’s follow-up CRM strategy implemented
in the whole organisation in much detail. Since this movement was a formal
and enterprise wide one, it might contain more values in managing customer
relationships. Therefore it would be even better to have that information and
lessons learnt.
4.7 Case study: University College Cork
4.7.1 Introduction and background
University College Cork is a third-level Irish university. It had established
online support providing learning materials for its undergraduates, postgraduates
and distance-learners since 1995. With students’ further demands of more
support from the system, university made use of a more interactive system called
e-learning management system (eLMS). Through the system, university
enhanced the management of relationships with students, who were equal to the
customers of CRM systems. As stated in the case, ‘an effective eLMS can
provide a university with a strategic advantage in the learning market’ (pp.586).
Relying on traditional teaching approaches, the university was difficult to
cope with problems raised by the increase of students, information overload from
the Internet, and students’ hopes in gaining continuous support. Thus, as a form
of e-learning, eLMS was emphasised to address these weakness. On the other
hand, CRM systems could be utilised to solve the corresponding issues: the
increased number of customers, effective support of valuable information just in
need, and continuous support to keep existing customers and attract new ones.
Hence eLMS could be regarded as another CRM service with students as
customers and educators as staff. In particular, the case focused on an
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individual department, Business Information Systems (BIS), which introduced
their own eLMS ‘Argus’ to support students within the group and any additional
service teaching.
In the case, Argus had effectively enhanced the learning process, enabled
students’ collaboration between each other, and tested their knowledge learnt in
class. Researchers of the case concluded that it was a prime example of a
successful system, and believed that it could and would ensure its ongoing
success. According to the comparison between eLMS and CRM systems above,
although Argus was mainly concerned with e-learning experience of students
offered by educational institutions, it could also make contributions to the
research of CRM systems within business organisations. Therefore it was
selected as a successful CRM case and was studied in this research.
4.7.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
The comparison between Argus and CRM system model is presented in
Appendix 7. One functional component was identified in marketing module,
which located in Corporate Customer Management.
Customer Retention. In order to effectively improve students’ satisfaction
and attract them to make most use of the e-learning system, Argus had applied
several characters in its design. First, the environment was simple,
straightforward and easy-to-use. Second, it was designed to be attractive and
interesting. The character then was achieved by good design, aesthetics, a
consistent look and feel, and human computer interaction. It could also
improve students’ commitment in e-learning by adopting mechanisms such as
rewarding the students who used it, or making studying in Argus a core part of
the course. Third, the design of the system was based on or rooted in a specific
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educational or pedagogical purpose, in order to ensure the effectiveness of eLMS.
Improving the system’s own quality made students to gain more insight into the
system, and be aware of its helpfulness to their study. This in turn could retain
students more effectively.
Sales
As illustrated in Appendix 7, no explicit part in sales module could be found.
Therefore information was not available here.
Customer service
In customer service module, except Field Force Automation, other three
components were all mentioned in the case.
Contact Centre. In academic environment, contact centre could be
regarded as the place and function where the educators supply academic
assistance to students when they were requested. Similar to in CRM systems,
Argus was designed to provide the instructor and department an integrated view
of the learning process. Some features available in Argus could also assist
educators in monitoring the progress of students’ studies, and to provide them
with further guidance and help accordingly. A case in point was the reporting
tool, which could calculate and report assignment average grade of the class and
each student’s average grade and individual grade.
Web-based Self-service. Opposite to the situation in contact centre,
web-based self-service was designed to face customers and could be customised
to address their specific problems, in the environment of CRM systems. When
this was adapted for academic purpose, Argus could be customised for the
requirements of the individual learner, and also provide individual student with
an aggregated information access point for his/her learning. For example,
students could download course materials online that might be mainly concerned
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with theoretical concepts; and interact with simulated add-on packages in the
system enabling them to acquire practical experience. In this way, Argus had
provided a ‘full view’ of the learning progress to students. The benefits were
obvious. In traditional classes, the level of collaboration among students and
development of problem-solving skills were directly restricted by the size of
classes. The larger the class was the less attention individual student was able
to obtain and the less opportunities for discussion and collaboration. When
studying in Argus, on the other hand, each student was the only host of his/her
learning process and learning materials were specially offered to him/her.
Furthermore, each student was different in his/her learning abilities, the
integrated learning interface thus allowed individuals to work at his/her own pace
by providing structured support.
Bulletin Board. In Argus, bulletin board was constructed as a discussion
forum that allowed both instructors and students to exchange ideas. Students
could respond feedbacks to the instructors, and also raise queries to be answered
by both instructors and other students. The bulletin board kept the record of the
initial queries and corresponding discussion stream of answers in sequence. In
this way, some common information and problems that might be encountered by
most students could be shared and tracked by all the participants including the
instructors. As a result, it speeded up the effective spread of information and
knowledge, as well as strengthened learning support to students.
Customer Satisfaction Measurement. As mentioned above, students were
enabled to put up their satisfaction level to every component functioning in
Argus through the discussion forum. The feedback information could be the
students’ use of the system, what they had learnt by using it, and so on. It not
only offered students with opportunities to participate in and refine the ongoing
design of the eLMS, but also could enhance users’ acceptance of the system.
Other evaluation criteria and methods included the results of exams and
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assignments, statistical analysis, quality reviews and assessments, qualitative
judgement from the lecturers, and studies of control groups of students.
Therefore Argus had established an effective feedback mechanism to measure
students’ satisfaction level as well as apply the results to future services.
4.7.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in University College Cork,
CSFs could be concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Improve the design and quality of the system surrounding the purpose it
aims to achieve to better retain its customers.
Sales
Not available.
Customer service
1) Provide the customer service staff with an integrated information access
interface to manage and monitor relationships with customers;
2) Provide individual customer with an integrated and customisable
information access point for him/her to obtain support in his/her own
needs;
3) Keep the records of previous customers’ queries and corresponding
discussions and answers, and make them available for both customers
and staff to track and refer to;
4) Develop effective feedback mechanism, e.g. bulletin board, to measure
customer satisfaction level and apply the results to refine future work.
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4.7.4 Conclusion
The case described an e-learning system, Argus, developed and adopted by
the department of Business Information Systems (BIS) in a third-level Irish
university, University College Cork. Similar to CRM systems assisting an
organisation to manage its customer relationships, Argus was designed to help
the university to acquire new students and retain existing students. The
e-learning system had successfully supported students in their learning process as
well as educators in their monitoring of students’ learning situation. An
effective feedback mechanism was also successfully developed, mainly by
making use of discussion forum.
However, the discussion and analysis were based on the e-learning system
in academic environment, which was different from CRM systems in business
circumstances. Although certain characters could be related from one to the
other, there would definitely be some misfits between the two. For instance,
e-learning system might be more tutorial-oriented, but CRM systems might be
more profit-oriented. Therefore there would be some limitations in treating this
case study as a CRM case study.
4.8 Case study: Shanghai General Motors (Shanghai GM)
4.8.1 Introduction and background
Shanghai General Motors (Shanghai GM) was established on 12 June, 1997,
and it is the largest Chinese and American joint-stock enterprise in China so far.
The entire investment was US$1.52 billion, and with 50% investment each from
Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (Group) and General Motors. It is
located in Shanghai’s Pudong Jinqiao Export Processing Zone and occupies
800,000 square metres. It also owns three production bases, in Jinqiao, Yantai
and Shenyang. In addition, Shanghai GM has set up the first advance-level
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flexible production line in China attaining the world-class standard, which
includes stamping, vehicle bodies, painting, assembly and other links in the
assembly chain.
Several years ago, General Motors in America planned to develop core
competitive advantages to survive in future economic environments, which were
identified as abilities to satisfy customers’ needs, and further to effective acquire
and retain customers. In order to conform the worldwide customer-centric trend
and gain new competitive advantages, General Motors decided and made specific
plans to implement CRM systems globally. At the same time, with the rapid
development of businesses but comparatively poor and disconnected customer
services, Shanghai GM intended to implement a holistic strategy that could
highlight its brand and build up the corporation a holistic image facing to its
customers. Therefore, under GM’s global customer-centric strategies, Shanghai
GM started its CRM project and had already invested US$2.5 million.
The CRM software package adopted by Shanghai GM was from Siebel,
which occupied the most share of CRM market, 67%, in 1999. The company
also invited IBM, which was experienced in CRM implementation, as its partner
to take charge of the CRM project. At the time of the finish of the report, CRM
system components that had been implemented in Shanghai GM had already
showed strong competence in improving company’s business performance and
customer services. The system was even regarded as the first set of
enterprise-wide CRM system in China. Thus the case of Shanghai GM could
act as the representative CRM system implementation in China, and was suitable
to be studied in this research.
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4.8.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
As shown in Appendix 8, ‘P’ represented system components that were
planned to but had not been implemented yet. Hence functional components
that were going to have and had realised in Shanghai GM were associated with
two main types, Cross-Selling and Up-Selling, and Corporate Customer
Management.
Cross-Selling and Up-Selling. Cross-selling was described as a ‘gold
mine’ within CRM systems in the case. American GM had already successfully
promoted a variety of services through cross-selling. A case in point was
recommending hotels to its existing customers who bought GM cars, when they
went travelling. On one hand, it improved customers’ experiences in interacting
with the company they trusted in, by saving their time and preventing troubles.
On the other hand, the company was able to maximise customer values, improve
profits, and reduce costs. Therefore Shanghai GM was considering whether its
customer information could also be used for cross-selling and how. It still
needed time to research and prove.
Corporate Customer Management. After analysing weaknesses in the
management of customer information, Shanghai GM reconstructed its ways to
store and organise those useful information. First, customer and related car
information were gathered in the same repository enabling effective information
management, sharing and cooperation among different departments, touchpoints,
retailers, and repair and maintenance shops. Second, the information stored
included not only customers’ register information when they bought cars, but
also the follow-up dynamic information about the cars and customers. Dynamic
information about the car could be the current state of the car, its repair and
maintenance records, which repair and maintenance shop did it go to, which parts
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of the car had been exchanged, who operated the repair and so on. Dynamic
information about the customers could contain historic telephone campaigns to
specific customers, customers’ complaints about particular products or services,
customers’ conversations when contacting to the call centre and so on. To a
certain extent, dynamic product and customer information were much more
important than static information such as customer personal data, model number
of the car, and engine number etc. It was because they acted as the information
base that enabled the company to provide efficient, accurate and consistent
customer services.
Customer Retention. The last step of the CRM project in Shanghai GM
would be to analyse and categorise customer information in detail. By adopting
technologies such as data warehouse and data mining, the company could
analyse customers’ satisfaction level to its products and services, customer
loyalty, and customer profitability. According to these results, the company was
enabled to further design and refine its campaign activities to attract new
customers and retain existing customers more effectively. As commented in the
case, these functionalities would then be the exact core values embedded in the
CRM systems for Shanghai GM.
Behaviour Prediction. As discussed in Customer Retention above,
understanding what customers needed and predicting their purchase behaviours
required the implementation of sophisticated modelling and data mining based on
rich customer data and information. Hence, with the finish of the last step of
the CRM project, Shanghai GM’s abilities in understanding customers and their
behaviours would be greatly enhanced. This, in turn, would assist in the
effectiveness of company’s marketing campaigns.
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Customer Value Modelling. The same as Behaviour Prediction, to build up
customer value models and calculate each customer’s profitability relied on
technologies like data warehouse and data mining. Therefore, after the
implementation of the final step, Shanghai GM would be able to effectively
identify targeted customers and differentiate services accordingly.
Channel Optimisation. Shanghai GM offered its customers with multiple
channels to interact with the company. Customers could directly go and visit
retailers as well as repair and maintenance shops. They were also able to
contact the company through phone calls to the operators in contact centres. At
the same time, the new Web site provided customers with a range of self-services
and company’s e-mail address. Thus customers were enabled to choose
communication methods according to their preferences.
Sales
Turning to sales module, Sales Force Automation and Field Force
Automation were both mentioned in the case.
Contact Management. The lifecycle of cars decided the periodical nature
of car purchases, which meant customers would come back to the market after
they had bought new cars for certain years. As Shanghai GM’s analysis about
existing customers showed, up to 65% of the customers who already owned a
GM car would choose Shanghai GM again at their next purchase; but only 35%
of the customers who had other company’s car in the past would turn to Shanghai
GM at their next purchase. Therefore Shanghai GM’s existing customers were
valuable resources to greatly enhance company’s sales. Depending on the
records of each existing customer, contact management tools would provide
customised sales activities to track and encourage them to choose GM cars again
next time. In particular, salespersons were required to visit customers newly
bought GM cars in one month, and collect, store customers’ opinions in the CRM
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systems. In the following 4 to 5 years, contact management tools would keep
on reminding sales staff and customer service staff from time to time to contact
those customers and supply necessary services and cares, stimulating them to buy
GM cars again at next purchase. Hence the contact management effectively
assisted Shanghai GM in improving customer satisfaction and maintaining
customer loyalty.
Lead Management. Shanghai GM identified two kinds of people as its
potential customers. One kind was people or groups that had never bought a car,
but planned to buy one or many recently; the other kind was people or groups
that had never bought GM cars, but planned to buy new cars. At the same time,
Shanghai GM also determined methods to turn potential customers into
customers. According to the analysis of historical data, the company designed
several attractive marketing campaigns to offer more potential customers with
more channels to know about GM cars. For example, they organised car
exposition and allowed people to order GM cars on site. As a result, it received
a large amount of customer orders during only a 3-day time. Furthermore, the
company also paid great attention to the management of potential customers.
Customers who had the intention to buy GM cars were divided into four types
based on the time of their planning: buying the car immediately, buying the car in
three months, buying the car in six months, and buying the car in one year. The
system would design and allocate different sales activities for sales staff to
execute. To customers planning to buy the car immediately, the system would
inform the salesperson to provide close services to the customer to achieve the
deal; to customers planning to buy the car in three months, the system would
suggest salespersons to consider how to shorten the time of buying; to customers
planning to buy the car in six months, the system would notice salespeople to
provide car information in comparatively detail; to customers planning to buy the
car in one year, sales staff were instructed to offer only ordinary information. In
this way, Shanghai GM not only effectively turned the most likely leads into real
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orders as many as possible, but also saved costs and time by differentiating sales
strategies.
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented). In the sales processes, regional
retailers interacted with and received orders from customers directly, instead of
Shanghai GM. Therefore the sales-oriented field force of Shanghai GM
indicated its regional retailers, and the automation terminals of the CRM systems
were implemented at each retailer’s. Ideally, salespeople of each regional
retailer should selectively enter customer and sales information in an organised
way into the CRM systems of Shanghai GM. On the contrary, they could also
conveniently search and retrieve useful information at real time from the central
system in the company, when interacting with customers. It not only improved
the efficiency and accuracy of sales activities carried out by field staff, but also
enabled the headquarters of Shanghai GM to have a holistic view over sales
status of all the regional retailers. However, since retailers were independent
business units from Shanghai GM, CRM terminals were passively implemented
at their places and they could see few incentives to cooperate. They generally
thought it would do good to Shanghai GM, but did not see much benefit they
could get. Thus, to cope with the system requirements, many retailers hired a
person who was skilled in computer operation to specially input information
rather than salespeople themselves. Obviously, a lot of data were inaccurate,
useless or even faked, which would be even worse than the situation before the
implementation of CRM systems. As a result, Shanghai GM was thinking
about adopting new incentive schemes and new terminal devices, e.g. palmtops.
Customer service
Except Customer Satisfaction Measurement had not been realised in
Shanghai GM’s CRM system yet, other three parts, Contact Centre, Web-based
Self-service and Field Force Automation (Service-oriented), were all
implemented in the project.
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Call Routing. The contact centre of Shanghai GM was made up of three
parts, thus customer requests were routed to appropriate places accordingly. As
the definition in literature review, customers here meant ultimate customers who
bought GM cars and services, field staff (internal customers) who were
responsible for repairing and maintaining cars, as well as retailers who ordered
products from the company and resold them to external customers. Hence the
first part of the contact centre was for external customers, anyone who was
interested in or owned GM cars could ring the customer service staff up and
made inquiries or complaints. The second part was opened for the repair and
maintenance shops located in different regions of the country. This part could
be categorised as the function supporting the service-oriented Field Force
Automation, and it was described in detail in subsequent paragraphs. The last
part was specially prepared for Shanghai GM’s retailers, which was managed
according to geographic regions and conducted through a platform system. By
entering the number of the car ordered, regional retailers could retrieve and track
current state of that car. The information could be specific to each process in
the assembly line. In this way, external and internal customers’ requests were
successfully routed to appropriate places in the contact centre. By categorising
the types of requests, Shanghai GM was enabled to offer effective and efficient
customer services to the correct targeted customer segments.
Complaints Management. As mentioned in Corporate Customer
Management, customers’ complaints were gathered and stored in the same
database as a kind of dynamic customer information. By resolving the
problems and keeping the records for future complaints, Shanghai GM could
successfully enhance customer satisfaction and prevent customer defection.
Workforce Management. As discussed above, the first part of contact
centre opened for external customers run a 12-hour service every day, from 8 am
to 8 pm. Customer service representatives were all experienced and
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professional in answering customer inquiries and solving problems.
Furthermore, Shanghai GM regularly organised relative trainings to improve
customer service standard. The result was proved to be optimistic, but it might
be more effective to do some more sophisticated planning in the management,
e.g. optimal number of CSRs during peak time, personnel arrangement according
to individual skills, etc.
Web-based Self-service. Shanghai GM had created a brand new Chinese
Web site for customers to navigate and obtain information they needed,
especially the guidance in choosing and buying cars. The Web site also
provided company’s e-mail address enabling customers to contact the company
by sending e-mail online. In this way, customers could conveniently find and
search information about Shanghai GM and its products according to their own
pace and needs.
Customer Satisfaction Measurement. In order to improve customer
retention rate, analytical functions of the CRM systems were planned to adopt in
the project of Shanghai GM. Measuring customer satisfaction level was then
enabled by these analytical functions. Feedbacks about the cars and services
were first collected from targeted customers. By applying tools like data
warehouse and data mining to the feedbacks, Shanghai GM was able to evaluate
customer satisfaction. The results would then be used to refine the company’s
products and services to better address the targeted customers’ preferences.
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented). As mentioned in ‘Call
Routing’, the second part of the contact centre provided technology support for
the repair and maintenance shops distributed in different regions of the nation.
Hence it was the customer service prepared for service-oriented Field Force
Automation. Shanghai GM had accumulated a large amount of faults and
corresponding fix methods of a variety of cars in the database, and provided the
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information through the CRM platform. When the engineer in the contact
centre received an inquiry from the field staff, he/she was then enabled to search
and retrieve relevant information from the database. The system would remind
the engineer to ask some more questions to further confirm the problem, and
automatically give the answers and fix procedures. With the assistance of the
platform, engineers at the contact centre could provide rapid and accurate
responses, which greatly improved the service level at each repair and
maintenance shop, and thus customer satisfaction.
4.8.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in Shanghai General Motors
(Shanghai GM), CSFs could be concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Store customer information, both static (e.g. name, address, product
purchased, service received etc.) and dynamic (e.g. complaints, queries,
his/her product status, repair records etc.), in the same repository;
2) Apply sophisticated technologies, such as data warehouse and data
mining, to customer information to understand and predict customer
behaviours, satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability etc., to further design
appropriate marketing campaigns;
3) Provide customers with various communication channels, and enable
them to interact with the company according to their preferences.
Sales
1) Track and contact existing customers regularly after the purchases and
during the product’s lifecycle, to improve customer satisfaction and
maintain loyalty, encourage them to repurchase after the end of the
product’s lifecycle;
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2) Identify different kinds of potential customers or leads, and differentiate
sales strategies to turn them into customers or orders effectively;
3) Adopt effective incentive schemes and appropriate remote devices to
encourage field force, especially independent retailers, to automate field
sales.
Customer service
1) Divide targeted customers into groups, route their inquiries to
appropriate places in the contact centre, and provide different customer
services according to the categories;
2) Effectively solve customer complaints in time and keep the records for
future reference, to improve customer satisfaction and prevent customer
defection;
3) Develop Web site for customers to access information, proceed
transactions, and get online services on a 24 7 base;
4) Collect customer feedbacks and apply analytical tools, e.g. data
warehouse, data mining, to the information to systematically evaluate
customer satisfaction;
5) Collect, store and organise customer service knowledge in database,
and enable customer service staff to rapidly search and retrieve relevant
information to effectively help field service personnel.
4.8.4 Conclusion
Compared with previous case studies in the research, the CRM system
implemented in Shanghai General Motors (Shanghai GM) was relatively
comprehensive and evenly covered marketing, sales and customer service
modules. On the whole, the system was quite successful and had already
brought the company a lot of benefits in sales and customer services. With the
completion of the system’s analytical functions, it is reasonable to believe that
Shanghai GM could greatly improve its performances and be outstanding in the
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market.
The case study also pointed out difficulties in implementing CRM terminal
devices at the retailers’. Because majority customer information and
transaction information needed to be electronically collected from the retailers,
Shanghai GM had to figure out more practical incentive schemes to successfully
encourage retailers to cooperate with the CRM project.
4.9 Case study: Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited
(TH-UNIS)
4.9.1 Introduction and background
Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited (TH-UNIS) was founded on
18th of March 1999, and specialises in information technology and
communications. As a public company, it now contains 14 departments, has 16
holding companies (Tsinghua University accounts for 62%), and has purchased
shares in 17 companies. The company is one of the State Top 520 Major
Enterprises, one of the State Major New Technology Enterprises, and one of the
Top 100 Electronic Information Enterprises in China.
With the strong business and technology background, the company began to
explore the way to increase its management of supply chain to further address
customers’ rapid developing needs and gain competitive advantages. TH-UNIS
first initiated the transformation from one company, UNISNET, within the group,
which produces web security software and other web related products, e.g.
routers. The front-office of the company included regional agents, marketing
department, sales department, and customer service department. Since all the
sales were through regional agents, no direct information, sales or stock flows to
and from customers were available to the company.
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In order to conquer the weakness, UNISNET had adopted the CRM
software ‘TurboCRM V2.0 (Enterprise Version)’. After 2 months work,
simulative execution of new business processes was conducted on the software.
The new CRM system had successfully increased the efficiency and consistency
of business processes that were concerned with front-office. Later on,
UNISNET also planned to implement ‘TurboLINK’ to manage the work of its
regional agents. In this way, as a successful CRM case, it was selected to
analyse.
4.9.2 Case study analysis
Marketing
As can be seen in Appendix 9, the original case study mainly discussed
about the functional component Corporate Customer Management in marketing
module.
Corporate Customer Management. TurboCRM emphasised the store of
customer data and information in an organised way, which was the base of
effective data analysis and data mining. It provided large relational database to
centralise and organise all the customer information, ensuring the safety and
effective usage of the data. Moreover, by applying analytical tools, senior
management were enabled to make more appropriate decisions.
Behaviour Prediction. Customer behaviour prediction also relied on the
analysis of customer data and information. Thus it was enabled by UNISNET’s
accumulation of customer information over time and the central data repository
provided by TurboCRM.
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Customer Value Modelling. To create customer value models and
calculate customer profitability was based on the same foundation of Behaviour
Prediction. Hence this function was successfully realised by the CRM system
implemented in UNISNET.
Sales
In sales module, UNISNET had implemented several functional components
in Sales Force Automation, and it planned to implement Field Force Automation
(Sales-oriented) as the next step of the CRM project.
Sales Process/Activity Management. First, TurboCRM allowed UNISNET
to customise the interface of its order forms, according to the characters of its
businesses. It ensured important sales information to be entered and stored in
the system. Second, TurboCRM also enabled the customisation of sales
processes, such as the produce of orders, the execution of orders and so on. In
this way, UNISNET was able to unify sales processes throughout the company,
as well as design its favoured operation interface and sales procedures.
Sales and Territory Management. Through TurboCRM, UNISNET could
build up a ‘virtual enterprise’ based on its structure. The function was much
wider than the scope of sales, but it was also typical in sales and territory
management. In the ‘virtual enterprise’, managers was able to create
‘department’, ‘employee’ (personal information), employee’s ‘role in the
company’, and ‘extent of authority’. UNISNET had finished the definition of
all the roles in front-office. All the information was available and sharable
through a single interface, but different people in different positions were limited
in their own scopes. It not only decreased redundant manual operations and
increased accuracy, but also protected security of data (could only be accessed by
people who were entitled to). At the same time, senior management could see
the holistic picture of the front-office, track and evaluate specific tasks or the
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work of individuals. Thereby, efficiency and effectiveness of the management
of employees (included sales staff) and business processes (included sales
activities) were greatly increased.
Contact Management. After the order had done, the system would
automatically track the status of the payment. It would remind salespeople to
collect payment, when it was near the time agreed; and would send information
electronically to remind customers to pay, when the payment was overdue.
Therefore salespeople were freed up from administrative work, and could focus
more on sales activities themselves. It also improved the efficiency and
accuracy of sales activities.
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented). The next step of the CRM
project in UNISNET was to implement TurboLINK on each regional agent’s site.
Through the Internet connection, regional agents were able to access the
company’s database to search and retrieve useful information, such as stock,
orders and so on. Regional agents were also responsible for entering sales data
and customer information in their daily work, for UNISNET to accumulate
necessary information for business management and decision-making. Thus the
whole process of sales and information collection was efficiently integrated
between UNISNET and its regional agents. Regional agents could get more
support from UNISNET, while UNISNET could keep in closer touch with its
customers.
Customer service
Less functional components in customer service were mentioned in
UNISNET. In fact, the case only discussed the use of Call-Scripting in Contact
Centre.
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Call-Scripting. Contact centre or customer service department in
UNISNET was also recognised as an important source of customer information.
It was where UNISNET could contact directly with its customers. Every
incoming call must be answered, and every problem must be solved in time. By
recording customers’ interaction with UNISNET, the company collected and
stored customer personal data and dynamic data, e.g. complaints, problems etc.
At last, the function enabled UNISNET to enhance its customer service level and
customer satisfaction.
4.9.3 CSFs for the case study
By checking performances in the three modules in Tsinghua Unisplendour
Corporation Limited (TH-UNIS), CSFs could be concluded as follows.
Marketing
1) Provide a central database to store customer information in an organised
way, and apply analytical tools to extract useful information to further
understand customers for effective decision-making.
Sales
1) Customise sales processes according to the company’s business needs,
and also execute the customised processes as an enterprise-wide
standard to improve efficiency and accuracy;
2) Enable sales staff to access and modify information from an integrated
interface, and define security attributes, e.g. users’ extent of authority,
to ensure data safety;
3) Provide reporting functions for senior management to track and
evaluate all the sales activities undertaken and individual performances;
4) Provide administrative contact tools to help sales staff to arrange daily
work, enabling them to focus more on improving sales;
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5) Create a two-way communication between the headquarter and field
force (or regional agents), enabling field staff to get support from the
headquarter and headquarter to collect customer and sales information
from field staff.
Customer service
1) Collect, record and organise customers’ interaction with the company to
build up customer data and knowledge base for efficient and effective
customer services.
4.9.4 Conclusion
Generally speaking, Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited (TH-UNIS)
had successfully implemented the CRM software package, TurboCRM, in the
company, UNISNET, within its group. The software focused on the build and
utilisation of customer and transaction information base. The management of
sales activities and processes was also highly automated. Thus these characters
of the CRM system had largely improved UNISNET’s analytical ability and
efficiency in business performances.
On the other hand, UNISNET still put more efforts into the improvement of
its internal processes, rather than services facing to external customers. The
company should consider more in how to better communicate with its customers
and develop long-term relationships with them. It was also one important
objective CRM system was developed for.
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Chapter 5 Discussion
5.1 Introduction
This chapter combines the CSFs identified in each case study into three
areas, marketing, sales, and customer service. Overall CSFs for each area of
CRM are concluded and categorised, and they further contribute to the global
CSFs for CRM.
5.2 Marketing
5.2.1 Discussion
By combining and categorising all the CSFs identified in marketing module,
it had found out 4 types of CSFs.
‘Understand company’s targeted customers’. 7 out of 8 marketing CSFs
identified in individual case study were categorised in this area. Therefore it
was determined as an overall CSF for CRM implementation. According to the
CSFs for individual case studies, specific contents were synthesised and listed as
follows.
1) Be clear about who the target customers are;
2) Apply sophisticated technologies, such as data warehouse and data
mining, to customer information to understand and predict customer
behaviours, satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability etc., to further design
appropriate marketing campaigns;
3) Find out who might leave, who have left, and understand why, decide
how to prevent;
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4) Gain deep understanding of target customers, e.g. aspects they are
satisfied or dissatisfied with, in order to adopt corresponding movements
to address problems, improve satisfaction and finally keep them stay.
‘Centralise customer information’. 6 out of 8 marketing CSFs identified in
individual case study were categorised in this area. Therefore it was determined
as an overall CSF for CRM implementation. According to the CSFs for
individual case studies, specific contents were synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Provide powerful customer data collection ability;
2) Provide a central and enterprise-wide repository to store all the data and
information of the organisation’s customers, including both inbound and
outbound, static (e.g. name, address, product purchased, service received
etc.) and dynamic histories (e.g. complaints, queries, his/her product
status, repair records etc.).
The left 2 groups of CSFs. The first group had 2 out of 8 marketing CSFs
identified in individual case study, and the second had only 1. Therefore they
were not considered as overall CSFs for CRM implementation. The contents
are listed as follows.
1) Design marketing campaigns containing components in the full
campaign lifecycle;
2) Be clear about the goals of marketing campaigns, and conduct them part
by part;
1) Consider business environments and resources the organisation has,
when making decisions to expand markets.
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5.2.2 Conclusion
The overall CSFs identified in marketing module were (with Bullen and
Rockart’s (1981) CSFs classification):
1) ‘Understand company’s targeted customers’. (internal &
building-adapting)
2) ‘Centralise customer information’. (internal & monitoring)
5.3 Sales
5.3.1 Discussion
By combining and categorising all the CSFs identified in sales module, it
had found out 4 types of CSFs.
‘Proactively allocate, track, and evaluate direct sales activities contacting
customers’. 7 out of 8 sales CSFs identified in individual case study were
categorised in this area. Therefore it was determined as an overall CSF for
CRM implementation. According to the CSFs for individual case studies,
specific contents were synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Make sure exact target customer allocations to specific business units
and individuals, for the whole organisation to be more
customer-focused;
2) Design sales process with clear goals (the most important thing in sales
activities is to clearly define the purpose, and then the following
processes can be planned accordingly);
3) Customise sales processes according to the company’s business needs,
and also execute the customised processes as an enterprise-wide
standard to improve efficiency and accuracy;
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4) Provide reporting functions for senior management to track and evaluate
all the sales activities undertaken and individual performances;
5) Provide administrative contact tools to help sales staff to arrange daily
work, enabling them to focus more on improving sales;
6) Track and contact existing customers regularly after the purchases and
during the product’s lifecycle, to improve customer satisfaction and
maintain loyalty, encourage them to repurchase after the end of the
product’s lifecycle.
‘Provide sales force with central knowledge base through an integrated
interface’. 6 out of 8 sales CSFs identified in individual case study were
categorised in this area. Therefore it was determined as an overall CSF for
CRM implementation. According to the CSFs for individual case studies,
specific contents were synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Provide sales force with a unified knowledge-based resources to assist
their interaction with customers;
2) Enable sales staff to access and modify information from an integrated
interface, and define security attributes, e.g. users’ extent of authority, to
ensure data safety;
3) Store all the customer sales information in the same database, enabling
the management to track, monitor and evaluate sales activities and
performances on both corporate and individual levels;
4) Deduce useful figures from centralised customer sales information for
further decision-making and opportunity prediction.
The left 2 groups of CSFs. Two groups both only had 2 out of 8 sales
CSFs identified in individual case study. Therefore they were not considered as
overall CSFs for CRM implementation. The contents are listed as follows.
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1) Be reactive to competitors’ recent movements, and correctly identify
target customers the lead may point to;
2) Identify different kinds of potential customers or leads, and differentiate
sales strategies to turn them into customers or orders effectively.
1) Adopt effective incentive schemes and appropriate remote devices to
encourage field force, especially independent retailers, to automate field
sales;
2) Create a two-way communication between the headquarter and field
force (or regional agents), enabling field staff to get support from the
headquarter and headquarter to collect customer and sales information
from field staff.
5.3.2 Conclusion
The overall CSFs identified in sales module were (with Bullen and
Rockart’s (1981) CSFs classification):
1) ‘Proactively allocate, track, and evaluate direct sales activities
contacting customers’. (internal & monitoring)
2) ‘Provide sales force with central knowledge base through an integrated
interface’. (internal & monitoring)
5.4 Customer service
5.4.1 Discussion
By combining and categorising all the CSFs identified in customer service
module, it had found out 8 types of CSFs.
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‘Provide a one-stop, sharable and enterprise wide information access portal
for customer service staff to store, update, retrieve customer information (static
and dynamic) at real time’. 7 out of 8 customer service CSFs identified in
individual case study were categorised in this area. Therefore it was determined
as an overall CSF for CRM implementation. According to the CSFs for
individual case studies, specific contents were synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Provide a one-stop and sharable information access portal for customer
service staff, which integrates enterprise-wide customer information
and application systems;
2) Allow customer service staff to easily store, update and track customer
data and interaction information in a central database at real time when
they are providing customer services, ensuring the efficiency,
consistency and accuracy of their services;
3) Collect, store and organise customer service knowledge in database, and
enable customer service staff to rapidly search and retrieve relevant
information to effectively help field service personnel.
‘Build a consistent customer feedback mechanism to continuously track and
measure customer satisfaction level and further improve customer services’. 6
out of 8 customer service CSFs identified in individual case study were
categorised in this area. Therefore it was determined as an overall CSF for
CRM implementation. According to the CSFs for individual case studies,
specific contents were synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Build up consistent customer feedback mechanisms, e.g. bulletin board,
to track customer satisfaction level and refine future work;
2) Conduct customer satisfaction survey periodically to improve services
accordingly;
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3) Develop effective customer feedback mechanism to continuously
evaluate existing processes and improve future activities in CRM;
4) Collect customer feedbacks and apply analytical tools, e.g. data
warehouse, data mining, to the information to systematically evaluate
customer satisfaction.
‘Provide a one-stop and customisable information access portal for external
customers to obtain cross-functional services and information from the
organisation, usually through the Web and the call centre’. 5 out of 8 customer
service CSFs identified in individual case study were categorised in this area.
Therefore it was determined as an overall CSF for CRM implementation.
According to the CSFs for individual case studies, specific contents were
synthesised and listed as follows.
1) Provide an integrated customisable entry point (interface) for customers
to easily access organisation’s various knowledge-based resources and
cross-functional back-end services, in order to ensure customers receive
efficient, consistent and accurate support from the company;
2) Develop personalised and innovative Web-based services for customers
to access information, proceed transactions on a 24 7 base, in order to
maintain existing customers and attract new customers.
‘Enable customers interact with the company in their preferred way by
providing multiple communication channels, and allow the company to route
customers’ requests towards company’s favoured way’. 5 out of 8 customer
service CSFs identified in individual case study were categorised in this area.
Therefore it was determined as an overall CSF for CRM implementation.
According to the CSFs for individual case studies, specific contents were
synthesised and listed as follows.
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1) Provide customers with various communication channels, and enable
them to interact with the company according to their preferences;
2) Divide targeted customers into groups, route their inquiries to
appropriate places in the contact centre, and provide different customer
services according to the categories;
3) Enable company to automatically route customers’ requests towards the
company’s favoured way, e.g. minimise the costs by reducing
customers’ accesses to human staff.
‘Collect and assemble customer complaints and solutions, making them
available for both customers and staff’. 4 out of 8 customer service CSFs
identified in individual case study were categorised in this area. Therefore it
was determined as an overall CSF for CRM implementation. According to the
CSFs for individual case studies, specific contents were synthesised and listed as
follows.
1) Manage customer complaints efficiently and effectively, and build
standardised solutions;
2) Collect and assemble company’s product, problem and corresponding
fix information from customers, by applying techniques like data mining
to predict customer problems that might occur and recommend
appropriate solutions efficiently and proactively;
3) Keep the records of previous customers’ queries and corresponding
discussions and answers, and make them available for both customers
and staff to track and refer to.
The left 3 groups of CSFs. The first group had 2 out of 8 customer service
CSFs identified in individual case study, and the other two groups both only had
1 out of 8. Therefore they were not considered as overall CSFs for CRM
implementation. The contents are listed as follows.
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1) Be reactive and proactive when providing customer services;
2) Create and maintain close social ties with target customers through
personal interaction with the customer and people related to them.
1) Differentiate services or products according to customer’s profitability
to the bank.
1) Implement extensive employee trainings and incentive measures to
improve customer service and sales.
5.4.2 Conclusion
The overall CSFs identified in customer service module were (with Bullen
and Rockart’s (1981) CSFs classification):
1) ‘Provide a one-stop, sharable and enterprise wide information access
portal for customer service staff to store, update, retrieve customer
information (static and dynamic) at real time’. (internal & monitoring)
2) ‘Build a consistent customer feedback mechanism to continuously track
and measure customer satisfaction level and further improve customer
services’. (internal & building-adapting)
3) ‘Provide a one-stop and customisable information access portal for
external customers to obtain cross-functional services and information
from the organisation, usually through the Web and the call centre’.
(internal & monitoring)
4) ‘Enable customers interact with the company in their preferred way by
providing multiple communication channels, and allow the company to
route customers’ requests towards company’s favoured way’. (internal &
monitoring)
5) ‘Collect and assemble customer complaints and solutions, making them
available for both customers and staff’. (internal & monitoring)
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5.5 Summary
Through the discussion, the global CSFs for CRM were the combination of
the overall CSFs in its three functional areas. Therefore, global CSFs for CRM
could be simplified as follows (CSFs are arranged according to the importance:
from more important to less important).
Marketing
1) Understand company’s targeted customers.
2) Centralise customer information.
Sales
1) Have good management in direct sales activities.
2) Support sales staff with central knowledge base through an integrated
interface.
Customer service
1) Provide a one-stop and enterprise wide information access portal to
customer service staff.
2) Build a consistent customer feedback mechanism.
3) Provide a one-stop and customisable information access portal to
customers.
4) Provide customers with multiple communication channels, and allow
company to route requests in its favoured way.
5) Collect customer complaints and develop standard solutions.
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Chapter 6 Conclusion and Further Research
6.1 Conclusion
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a newly rising phenomenon in
relational marketing environment. Because it is immature in both theoretical
and practical fields, there are a lot of research opportunities available. In the
research, CRM is defined as a business strategy, which has three basic
characteristics, ‘customer-driven’, ‘cross-functional’ and ‘technology-integrated’.
The study chose the perspective in exploring how to make CRM strategy
successful in companies and organisations. The exploring tool adopted was
critical success factors (CSFs). By identifying CSFs in a survey of CRM case
studies, the study built up its own theory of the CSFs to the successful
implementation of CRM systems.
Nine CSFs were identified in the research. CSFs in marketing focus on the
analytical functions of CRM, which are used to collect and understand customer
information to better serve marketing activities. CSFs in sales focus more on
sales activity management and knowledge support for field sales. CSFs in
customer service focus on the information access, customer feedback and
complaints management, and channel optimisation. The results show that more
CSFs are located in customer service module, which just represents the emphasis
in customer service of CRM existing in many literatures. Therefore all the nine
CSFs have built up the CSFs in implementing CRM systems, which are the
conclusion to the research of this dissertation.
133
6.2 Further research
Based on the limitation of this research, recommendations of further
research are listed as follows.
First, with more time available, it is desirable to survey more CRM case
studies than the limited 8 in this research. More data would make the result
more objective and correct.
Second, similar research can develop more complex CRM model as a tool
to analyse the case study. For example, it can examine CRM systems from
operational CRM, analytical CRM, and collaboration CRM, or even check the
design of database.
Third, to be more critical in case study selection, such as have the primary
data from the company, can also lead to a better result. But it certainly is much
more time consuming.
Finally, there could be a validation step for this research. By adopting
deductive approach, CSFs identified in the study could be tested. In this way,
the theory could be further extended.
134
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144
Appendix 1
Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling
Customer Retention
Behaviour Prediction
Customer Value Modelling
Channel Optimisation
Personalisation
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy
Sales Process/Activity Management
Sales & Territory Management
Contact Management
Lead Management
Configuration Support
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented)
145
Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing
Call-Scripting
Sales Support
Complaints Management
E-mail Management
Instant Messaging
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management
FAQs
Cyberagents
E-mail Contact
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board
Customer Satisfaction Measurement
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented)
146
Appendix 2
Frontier Bank Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management Y
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention Y
Behaviour Prediction N
Customer Value Modelling N
Channel Optimisation n/a
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management Y
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management n/a
Lead Management n/a
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
147
Frontier Bank Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing n/a
Call-Scripting N
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management Y
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management n/a
FAQs Y
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact n/a
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board n/a
Customer Satisfaction Measurement Y
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
148
Appendix 3
Parish National Bank Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management Y
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling Y
Customer Retention Y
Behaviour Prediction N
Customer Value Modelling n/a
Channel Optimisation n/a
Personalisation Y
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management N
Lead Management Y
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
149
Parish National Bank Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing n/a
Call-Scripting n/a
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management n/a
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management Y
FAQs n/a
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact n/a
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board n/a
Customer Satisfaction Measurement N
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
150
Appendix 4
The Housing and Development Board Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management Y
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention n/a
Behaviour Prediction Y
Customer Value Modelling n/a
Channel Optimisation Y
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management n/a
Lead Management n/a
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
151
The Housing and Development Board Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing Y
Call-Scripting Y
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management n/a
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management n/a
FAQs n/a
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact Y
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board n/a
Customer Satisfaction Measurement Y
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
152
Appendix 5
Tieto-X Plc Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management n/a
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention
Behaviour Prediction
Customer Value Modelling
Channel Optimisation
Personalisation
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management Y
Contact Management n/a
Lead Management Y
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management Y
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
153
Tieto-X Plc Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing n/a
Call-Scripting n/a
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management n/a
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management n/a
FAQs n/a
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact n/a
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board n/a
Customer Satisfaction Measurement n/a
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
154
Appendix 6
International Business Machines Corp. Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management n/a
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention Y
Behaviour Prediction n/a
Customer Value Modelling n/a
Channel Optimisation Y
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management n/a
Lead Management n/a
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management Y
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
155
International Business Machines Corp. Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing n/a
Call-Scripting Y
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management n/a
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management n/a
FAQs
Cyberagents
E-mail Contact
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board
Customer Satisfaction Measurement Y
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
156
Appendix 7
University College Cork Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management n/a
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention Y
Behaviour Prediction n/a
Customer Value Modelling n/a
Channel Optimisation n/a
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management n/a
Lead Management n/a
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) n/a
157
University College Cork Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing
Call-Scripting
Sales Support
Complaints Management
E-mail Management
Instant Messaging
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management
FAQs n/a
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact n/a
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board Y
Customer Satisfaction Measurement Y
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
158
Appendix 8
Shanghai General Motors Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management n/a
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling P
Customer Retention P
Behaviour Prediction P
Customer Value Modelling P
Channel Optimisation Y
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management n/a
Sales & Territory Management n/a
Contact Management Y
Lead Management Y
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) Y
159
Shanghai General Motors Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing Y
Call-Scripting n/a
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management Y
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management Y
FAQs
Cyberagents
E-mail Contact
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board
Customer Satisfaction Measurement P
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) Y
160
Appendix 9
Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited Implemented Success Fail
Campaign Management n/a
Cross-Selling & Up-Selling n/a
Customer Retention n/a
Behaviour Prediction Y
Customer Value Modelling Y
Channel Optimisation n/a
Personalisation n/a
Mar
ketin
g
Cor
pora
te C
usto
mer
M
anag
emen
t
Customer Privacy n/a
Sales Process/Activity Management Y
Sales & Territory Management Y
Contact Management Y
Lead Management n/a
Configuration Support n/a
Sale
s For
ce A
utom
atio
n
Knowledge Management n/a
Sale
s
Field Force Automation (Sales-oriented) P
161
Tsinghua Unisplendour Corporation Limited Implemented Success Fail
Call Routing n/a
Call-Scripting Y
Sales Support n/a
Complaints Management n/a
E-mail Management n/a
Instant Messaging n/a
Con
tact
Cen
tre
Workforce Management n/a
FAQs n/a
Cyberagents n/a
E-mail Contact n/a
Web
-bas
ed
Self-
serv
ice
Bulletin Board n/a
Customer Satisfaction Measurement n/a
Cus
tom
er S
ervi
ce
Field Force Automation (Service-oriented) n/a
