Case Study 1: The Personal Touch (FedEx Information System: CLARIFY)

1.    What is CRM in general? Give Examples of Different CRM Applications.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in general is a software tool use by the company’s call center agents primarily design to quickly cater and resolve customers’ inquiries and complaints.  CRM assist the call center representatives of the company to quickly view all the necessary data of the customer and other necessary data to promptly resolve the issue of a customer who is calling. Secondly it provides the company precious information about the common complaints that the customer experiencing in terms of the services of the company to its customers thus providing the company a proactive way not to repeat the same problem a customer is experiencing or at least find a remedy to that problem. Third, it increases the productivity of the company’s revenue by satisfying its customer. Satisfy customer will always come back to continually avail the company’s service. CRM provides a way to make a single transaction a lot faster and efficient. The faster you can resolve a customer complaint the lesser the cost. Now a days CRM save millions of dollars worth of revenue around the world. New features are being added as world changes so with the needs of its customers.

Different Types of CRM Software and its examples

A. Sales force automation

Sales force automation (SFA) involves using software to streamline all phases of the sales process, minimizing the time that sales representatives need to spend on each phase. This allows a business to use fewer sales representatives to manage their clients.

B. Marketing

CRM systems for marketing help the enterprise identify and target potential clients and generate leads for the sales team. A key marketing capability is tracking and measuring multichannel campaigns, including email, search, social media, telephone and direct mail.

 

C. Customer Service and support

Recognizing that service is an important factor in attracting and retaining customers, organizations are increasingly turning to technology to help them improve their clients’ experience while aiming to increase efficiency and minimize costs

D. Appointment

Creating and scheduling appointments with customers is a central activity of most customer oriented businesses. Sales, customer support, and service personnel regularly spend a portion of their time getting in touch with customers and prospects through a variety of means to agree on a time and place for meeting for a sales conversation or to deliver customer service.

E. Analytics

Relevant analytics capabilities are often interwoven into applications for sales, marketing, and service. These features can be complemented and augmented with links to separate, purpose-built applications for analytics and business intelligence.

F. Integrated/Collaborative

Departments within enterprises — especially large enterprises — tend to function with little collaboration. More recently, the development and adoption of these tools and services have fostered greater fluidity and cooperation among sales, service, and marketing.

G. Small Business

For small business, basic client service can be accomplished by a contact manager system: an integrated solution that lets organizations and individuals efficiently track and record interactions, including emails, documents, jobs, faxes, scheduling, and more.

H. Social Media

Social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are amplifying the voice of people in the marketplace and are having profound and far-reaching effects on the ways in which people buy. Customers can now research companies online and then ask for recommendations through social media channels, making their buying decision without contacting the company.

I.             Non-profit and membership-based

Systems for non-profit and membership-based organizations help track constituents and their involvement in the organization. Capabilities typically include tracking the following: fund-raising, demographics, membership levels, membership directories, volunteering and communications with individuals.

CRM Examples

• SnapCRM is open source web-based customer relationship management software that integrates sales force automation modules such as the account management system, contact management system, sales lead tracking and marketing system, competitor management, sales forecasting, sales order management system, and product information system. SnapCRM should be run in Windows, but files and folders stored in SnapCRM can be accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac clients.

o   Vtiger CRM is open source CRM software for sales force automation of small and medium businesses. It can be run under Linux and Windows, and provide enterprise features such as Microsoft Outlook integration, email integration, and product customization.

o   InfusionSoft is highly recommended. Excellent web based CRM solution for small to medium companies seeking a comprehensive and reliable CRM tool. Awarded the prestigious 2007 CRM Excellence Award for “Top Small Business Marketing Software”.

o   SAP CRM- is an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) software manufactured by SAP AG that targets business software requirements of midsize and large organizations in all industries and sectors.

o   NetSuite CRMS- is the only on-demand CRM Software that gives you a real-time 360 degree view of your customers. With all your CRM Software contact management data in one system, you'll close more deals and improve customer satisfaction.

• SugarCRM - helps your business communicate with prospects, share sales information, close deals and keep customers happy.

2. Enumerate and explain the various ways in which the CRM application discussed here (Clarify) saves costs or helps in other ways.

          Answer:

CRM is a very useful tool for a company. It helps to save cost by providing a list of all common complaints and its probable solutions. More transactions at lower cost mean more profit. Clarify provides the top level managers essential data about the behavior of the customers such as customer doesn’t really want a very polite reps by making extra talk to the customer but rather customer wants a direct answer to their problems. The faster the reps resolve the issue of the customer the faster it gets off to the phone.

3. Which matrix would you use to measure before and after performance regarding the information technologies implemented in this case? Consider cost, service, quantity, cycle time, and any other performance factor and provide a specific metric (i.e. ratio, product, or absolute value).

Answer:

The best performance matrix to use in measuring the before and after performance regarding the information technologies implemented in this case is to use a line graph to have a good picture about the increase in productivity of its reps by looking the rate of increase of number of customers served over time versus the cost of operation. Line graph provides the viewer an impression about any two data they would like to see if it gains better performance over time. On the other hand, Bar Graph would also be good if you want to view if the performance of the reps increases when using the CRM compared to the old ways of handling the customers’ complaint.

4. As a customer, would you prefer more or less mechanized service in lieu of human help?

Answer:

For me, I would still prefer to talk to human representatives because I can discussed a lot more precise what are my needs to ensure I will got the more accurate response from the call center representative. Mechanized service often results if not properly design leads to non-accurate results thus making customers frustrated. Based on the research customers using mechanized service usually only try to resolve their problem 2 or 3 times but after trying if they will not get want they wanted they will quit and give up leaving them frustrated and unhappy. But there are still a significant number of customers that are now using online services of the company to resolve their problems. These customers are usually computer literate and have an easy access to the internet making online inquiry much more easily compared to calls.

5. As an executive for FedEx or a similar company, what else would you implement using software and the internet?

Answer:

If I can be at that position, I would be happy to have CRMS and other IS installed at my company. Company has a lot of information more than a users/employee could handle. Having a tool that could sort things out for a user could be very beneficial. For a company like the FedEx, transporting the client packages in the correct place at a right time is the highest priority. Customers needs to keep track on their valuable packages so they need to ask somebody from the FedEx company through their call center agent reps where their packages now. Like FedEx they cater 8 million packages on peak days. So, imagine to bulk of calls the company receiving are enormous and these calls must be address properly. To reduce these bulks of calls, as a top executive on this company I would seek a solution by installing a computer system that would assess or answer these calls by an automated computer with predefined answers. Those calls that cannot be catered by the automated computer will have an option to speak with a human representative. The other solution will be to have a site (website) for customers to make their inquiries about their package through online system applications. Through this I will significantly reduce the bulks of calls receive by the company’s representatives and reduce also the number of customers put on-hold during their calls. I would like also to install a Real-time mapping system to all major cargo and ships of FedEx that must be monitor 24/7 to ensure all packages arrived at the right place at the right time.