1. What is your understanding of CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) – involves managing all aspects of a customer’s relationship with an organisation to increase customer loyalty and retention and an organisation's profitability. CRM helps companies make their interactions with customers seem friendlier through individualization.
2. Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.
Operational CRM supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front-office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers.
Analytical CRM supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers
The primary difference between operational CRM and analytical CRM is the direct interaction between organisations and its customers.
3. Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments
Marketing department CRM technologies-
- List generators: compiles customer information from a variety of sources and segment the information for different marketing campaigns
- Campaign management system: guides users through marketing campaigns
- Cross-selling and up-selling:
Cross-selling – selling additional products or services
Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale
Up-selling – increasing the value of the sale
Sales department CRM technologies-
- Sales management- automomate each phase of the sales process, helping individual sales representatives co-ordinate and organise all of their accounts
- Contact management- maintains customer contact information and identifies prospective customers for future sales. E.g. - maintaining organisational charts.
- Opportunity management-target sales opportunities by finding new customers or companies for future sales
4. How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?
By implementing Sales management CRM systems, contact management CRM systems eg increase managements visibility of the sales process, and opportunity management CRM systems by gaining prospective customers.
5. Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses
Business intelligence (BI) – applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyze data and information to support decision-making efforts. BI includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front-and back-office systems.
Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;
- Determine who is the best and worst customer’s thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales
- Identify exceptional sales people
- Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful
- Determine in which activity they are making or losing money
6. Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem
Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making.
The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor
The solution: to improve the quality of business decisions, managers can provide existing staff with BI systems and tools that can assist them in making better, more informed decisions. The result creates an agile intelligent enterprise, a few examples of using BI to make informed business decisions include:
- Retail and sales – predicting sales; determining correct inventory levels and distributions schedules among outlets; and loss prevention
- Banking- forecasting levels of bad loans and fraudulent credit card use, credit card spending by new customers and which kind of customers will best respond to (and quality for) new loan offers
- Operation management- predicting machinery failures; finding key factors that control optimisation of manufacturing capacity.
7. What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?
Single point of access to information for all users- organizations can unlock information held within their databases by giving authorised users a single point of access to data.
BI across organizational departments-all departments across an organization from sales to operations to customer services can benefit from the value of BI
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