CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

CASE:

Never underestimate your Clients' Complaint, no matter how funny it might seem!

This is a real story that happened between the customer of General Motors and its Customer-Care Executive. Please read on.....

A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:

'This is the second time I have written to you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of Ice-Cream for dessert after dinner each night, but the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive
down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem.....

You see, every time I buy a vanilla ice-cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds "What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?" The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an Engineer to check it out anyway.

The latter was surprised to be greeted by a successful, obviously well educated man in a fine neighborhood. He had arranged to meet the man just after dinner time, so the two hopped into the car and drove to the ice cream store. It was vanilla ice cream that night and, sure enough, after they came back to the car, it wouldn't start.

The Engineer returned for three more nights. The first night, they got chocolate. The car started. The second night, he got strawberry. The car started. The third night he ordered vanilla. The car failed to start.

Now the engineer, being a logical man, refused to believe that this man's car was allergic to vanilla ice cream. He arranged, therefore, to continue his visits for as long as it took to solve the problem. And toward this end he began to take notes: He jotted down all sorts of data: time of day, type of gas uses, time to drive back and forth etc.

In a short time, he had a clue: the man took less time to buy vanilla than any other flavor. Why? The answer was in the layout of the store. Vanilla, being the most popular flavor, was in a separate case at the front of the store for quick pickup. All the other flavors were kept in the back of the store at a different counter where it took considerably longer to check out
the flavor.

Now, the question for the Engineer was why the car wouldn't start when it took less time. Eureka - Time was now the problem - not the vanilla ice cream!!!! The engineer quickly came up with the answer: "vapor lock". 

It was happening every night; but the extra time taken to get the other flavors allowed the engine to cool down sufficiently to start. When the man got vanilla, the engine was still too hot for the vapor lock to dissipate.

Even crazy looking problems are sometimes real and all problems seem to be simple only when we find the solution with clear and logical thinking.

Don't just say it is " IMPOSSIBLE" without putting a sincere effort....
What really matters is your attitude and your perception.

´Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing a company's interaction with current and potential future customers that tries to analyze data about customers' history with a company and to improve business relationships with customers, specifically focusing on customer retention and ultimately driving sales growth

Types of CRM

´Operational:The primary goal of customer relationship management systems is to integrate and automate sales, marketing, and customer support. Therefore, these systems typically have a dashboard that gives an overall view of the three functions on a single page for each customer that a company may have. The dashboard may provide client information, past sales, previous marketing efforts, and more, summarizing all of the relationships between the customer and the firm. Operational CRM is made up of 3 main components: sales force automation, marketing automation, and service automation.

´Analytical

The role of analytical CRM systems is to analyze customer data collected through multiple sources, and present it so that business managers can make more informed decisions. Analytical CRM systems use techniques such as data mining, correlation, and pattern recognition to analyze the customer data. These analytics help improve customer service by finding small problems which can be solved, perhaps, by marketing to different parts of a consumer audience differently.For example, through the analysis of a customer base's buying behavior, a company might see that this customer base has not been buying a lot of products recently. After scanning through this data, the company might think to market to this subset of consumers differently, in order to best communicate how this company's products might benefit this group specifically.

´Collaborative

The third primary aim of CRM systems is to incorporate external stakeholders such as suppliers, vendors, and distributors, and share customer information across organizations. For example, feedback can be collected from technical support call, which could help provide direction for marketing products and services to that particular customer in the future.

A good CRM should provide support for the following functions:

• capture and maintain of customer needs, motivations, and behaviors over the lifetime of the relationship

• facilitate the use of customer experiences for continuous improvement of this relationship

• integrate marketing, sales, and customer support activities measuring and evaluating the process of knowledge acquisition and sharing

CRM systems in practice

´Call centers

´Contact center automation

´Social media

´Location-based services

´CRM systems for business-to-business transactions

CRM ANALYSIS PROCESSES

´LEAD MANAGEMENT The focus of this process is on organizing and prioritizing contacts with the prospective customers. It involves integration with campaign management and service management, as well as customer profiling. A sub process of lead management is customer scoring, which uses quantitative and qualitative measures to rank the customer based on his or her interest in the product or service. This filtering process allows for more precise target marketing and it lowers the contact costs.

´CUSTOMER PROFILING The focus of this process is to develop a marketing profile of every customer by observing his or her buying patterns, demographics, buying and communication preferences, and other information that allows categorization of the customer. The knowledge generated from this process feeds into campaign management, sales management, service management, and the other processes discussed earlier. In addition, this process allows more individualized contact with the customer.

´FEEDBACK MANAGEMENT A good CRM requires a closed-knowledge management loop that consolidates, analyzes, and shares the customer information collected by CRM delivery and support processes with the analysis process, and vice versa. The loop can provide a road map for continuous improvement process for the company's products and services. A good system will discard unnecessary data and focus mainly on the knowledge useful for making better decisions.

CRM COMPONENTS

´MARKET RESEARCH

´SALES FORCE AUTOMATION (S FA)

´CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT

´DATA MINING AND ANALVTICS

´MARKET RESEARCH The two key functionalities here are campaign management and market analysis. Campaign management provides support for preparing such things as marketing budgets, ad placement, sales targeting, and response management. Marketing analysis tools provide statistical and demographic analysis, Web site traffic monitoring, and profiling tools. With the amount of data collected today these tools provide sophisticated segmenting and targeting capabilities in real time.

´SALES FORCE AUTOMATION (S FA) Sales force automation software has been around since long before CRM became a buzzword. Some of the current CRM vendors were originally in the SFA market. SFA tools provide basic functionality for sales personnel to automate sales lead distribution and tracking, sales reporting, pipeline management, contacts centralization and management, and group collaboration. In addition, they include such software for sales managers and executives as opportunity management, forecasting, reporting, analytics, and customizable dashboard capabilities so that they can be confident that their teams are producing at their full capacity. The goal of SFA software is to give businesses the upper hand with their sales data and to empower sales reps to spend more time selling and less time on administration.

´CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT The customer service function has gone through major changes since the advent of the Internet. Online help desks have become a common source for customers to find quick answers to complex technical questions. Customer service originally consisted of setting up a call center with access to a customer database and the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) Web site page. Today, with sophisticated CRM back-ends, companies have been able to consolidate the two areas into help desk support centers. Customer service functionality typicaUy includes help desk ticket management software, e-mail, interactive chat, Web telephony, and other interaction tools connected to a fully integrated customer database, which is connected to the supply chain management and ERP application. These tools can be accessed by a trained help center agent or by customers directly via the Internet.

´DATA MINING AND ANALTICS The amount of data being generated by the Web-driven business has been a driver for data mining and analytics functionality because it represents an extension of existing product lines rather than the creation of new ones. Such businesses as Amazon and eBay generate gigabytes of data per day, and even small Web sites easily generate megabytes of data. This data must be collected, sorted, organized, and analyzed for trends, demographics, cross-selling opportunities, and identification of other sales patterns. Sophisticated OLAP and data mining software are often integrated with CRM packages. 

ERP IMPLEMENTATION LIFE CYCLE

•ERP applications are prepackaged software developed by commercial software vendors and custom installed for organizations to automate and integrate the various business processes. Although ERP are packaged software they are very different from PC-based software packages (e.g., Microsoft Office or other software) tha t you may have purchased for personal use as shown in Table 4-1.

ERP IMPLEMENTATION PLAN

•There are three major implementation plan choices are:

1.Comprehensive.

2. Middle-of-the-Road.

3. Vanilla.

•Methodology refers to a systematic approach to solving a business problem. ERP methodology builds on the theory that an enterprise can maximize its returns by maximizing the utilization of its fixed supply of resources. Information technology, with its increasing computer power and the ability to correlate pieces of information, has proven to be the best tool for business problem solving. Like SDLC, an ERP development life cycle provides a systematic approach to implementing ERP software in the changing but limited-resource organizational environment. There are many different vendor-driven methodologies or approaches that use traditional ERP development life cycle or rapid ERP life cycles (e.g., Total Solution, FastTrack, Rapid-Re,ASAP, and BIM)

TRADITIONAL ERP LIFE CYCLE

•The traditional ERP life cycle includes the following major stages:

Stage 1. Scope and Commitment Stage.

Stage 2. Analysis and Design Stage.

Stage 3. Acquisition & Development Stage.

Stage 4. Implementation Stage.

Stage 5. Operation Stage

ROLE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT

•Change management (CM) plays an important role throughout the ERP life cycle. System failures often occur when the attention is not devoted to this from the beginning stages

 RAPID ERP LIFE CYCLES

•They provide different methodologies and techniques for rapid or accelerated implementation. Scripts and wizards provided by consultants can help automate some of the more common tasks that occur during an implementation. These include migration of data, identification of duplicate data, and other standard tasks.

•The appropriate implementation model may vary based on company, culture, software, budget, and the purpose of the implementation, but previous implementation experience of the program management and consultants will likely be the'largest driving factor in determining the best approach

TOTAL SOLUTION

1. The Value Proposition.

2. Reality Check.

3. AlignedApproach.

4. Success Dimension.

5. Delivering Value.

FASTTRACK

•Phases Designed to reflect and integrate decisions regarding business redesign, organizational change and performance, training, process and systems integrity, client-server technologies and technical architecture.

 1. Scoping and Planning: Project definition and scope. Project planning is initiated.

2. Visioning and Targeting: Needs assessment. Vision and targets identified. As-is modeling.

 3. Redesign: To-be Modeling. Software design and development.

4. Configuration: Software development. Integration test planning.

5. Testing and Delivery: Integration testing. Business and system delivery.

•Areas In addition, it identifies five areas (groups) as an individual thread to be woven into a cohesive fabric through its five phase workplan. The areas and a list of the functions performed are as follows:

1. Project Management (project organization, risk management, planning, monitoring, communications, budgeting, staffing, quality assurance).

2. Information Technology Architecture (hardware and network selection, procurement, installation, operations, software design, development, installation).

3. Process and Systems Integrity (security, audit control).

4. Change Leadership (leadership, commitment, organizations design, change-readiness, policies and procedures, performance measurements).

5. Training and Documentation (needs assessment, training design and delivery for project team, management, end-users, operations, and helpdesk. Scripting of enduser and operations documentation).

RAPID RE

•Gateway, a consulting firm in New York, has developed an ERP life cycle methodology called Rapid Re. The five-stage, 54-step modular methodology is customized to the needs of each project because that is what happens in practice. Individual projects skip, rearrange, or recombine tasks to meet their needs or give greater or lesser emphasis to some tasks.

Stage 1. Preparation. Mobilize, organize, and energize the people who will perform the reengineering project.

Stage 2. Identification. Develop a customer-oriented process model of the business.

Stage 3. Vision. Select the processes to reengineer and formulate redesign options capable of achieving breakthrough performance

Stage 4. Solution. Define the technical and social requirements for the new processes and develop detailed implementation plans.

Stage 5. Transformation. Implement the reengineering plans. In an ideal project, stages one and two consider all key processes within a company and conclude with a step that sets priorities for the processes to reengineer. The other stages are executed repeatedly for each process selected for reengineering.

ACCELERATED SAP (ASAP)

•The ASAP Roadmap is a detailed project plan by SAP that describes all activities in an implementation. It includes the entire technical area to support technical project management, and addresses such concerns as interfaces, data conversions, and authorizations earlier than do most traditional implementations. The ASAP Roadmap consists of five phases: project preparation, business blueprint, realization, final preparation, go-live, and support continuous change.

Phase 1. Project Preparation. Proper planning and assessing organizational readiness is essential. Determine if there is a:

• full agreement that all company decision makers are behind the project

• clear project objectives

• efficient decision-making process

• company culture that is willing to accept change.

Phase 2. Business Blueprint.

Phase 3. Realization.

Phase 4. Final Preparation.

Phase 5. Go-Live and Support.

BUSINESS INTEGRATION METHODOLOGY (BIM)

•The BIM methodology, developed by Accenture Systems in the 1990s, is targeted for full-scale ERP projects that diagnose business integration needs, design business strategies and architectures, deliver one or more business capabilities to meet those needs, and ensure that the value of those capabilities can be sustained over time.

1.The Planning Phase.

2.The Delivering Phase

3.The Managing Phase.

4.The Operating Phase.

SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE

There are various technical and organizational challenges in implementing ERP depending on

•the organization,

•scope of implementation,

•business processes,

•and skill level of the people using these applications

SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT LIFE CYCLE 

The process of developing new information systems is often called the system development life cycle (SDLC).It basically includes a

•systematic process of planning,

•designing,

•and creating an information system for organizations.

      

      For complex systems development projects (e.g., ERP), it is often better to have a structured methodology to avoid mishaps and coordinate the design and development tasks properly among the members of a large systems development team. 

TRADITIONAL SDLC

• The SDLC consists of tasks that are divided into phases or stages.

1.Investigation

2. Analysis

3. Design

4. Implementation

5. Maintenance

•. The SDLC process begins when someone in the organization  identifies a need for a new system. The reason could be to gain competitive advantage, improve operational efficiencies, expand business globally, or all of these. This investigation phase conducted by the IT department will determine the feasibility of successfully creating the new system from four different perspectives.

These perspectives are:

1. Organization feasibility-whether the new IT is aligned with the business strategy and plans of the organization

2. Technical feasibility-whether it is possible to solve the problem with the current generation of information technology

3. Economic feasibility-whether benefits from new system will outweigh the costs in the long term

4. Operational feasibility-whether the organization has the necessary resources to operate and support the new system

INVESTIGATION PHASE 

• the team should do a thorough analysis of the costs and benefits. The benefits derived from the new system as well as the costs associated with a new system are sometimes not very obvious

•Costs and benefits that can be quantified are called tangible, whereas those that cannot be quantified easily are called intangible.

• Benefits like productivity improvements with a new system similarly are tangible, whereas benefits gained due to better decision making are intangible

•A good development team will highlight these issues in their investigation report to top management such that they can plan for these expenses and revenues over a longer period of time, thereby increasing the chances for the new system to be implemented successfully.

• A report is prepared for management and other stakeholders at the end of the investigation phase. If approved, the project will begin the analysis phase; otherwise, the project is abandoned or merged with another project. 

ANALYSIS PHASE

•Before beginning the analysis phase, the development team is usually organized to include subject matter experts, consultants, and technical specialists. The primary task of the analysis phase is to determine the user requirements of the new system.

•One approach that works best is to focus on the problems of the current system

•The information collected from this phase is analyzed and categorized by different user groups and organized into a coherent list of new system-functional requirements.

DESIGN PHASE

In the design phase, the focus is on

•the new system's architecture,

•user interface,

•and reporting requirements.

These requirements are grouped by input, process, and output stages of a system. The design phase produces the blueprint or technical specifications of the new system. The technical requirements and the architecture will again be scrutinized by the management team. Once approved, the team can begin work on implementing the new system.

IMPLEMENTATION PHASE

The implementation phase begins with

•the acquisition of hardware, software, development of custom applications (if necessary),

• new system testing, training, and conversion of data from the old system to the new system.

 RAPID SDLC APPROACHES

 

The SDLC process has several problems, even though it is rigorous in making sure that the new system is complete and successful in the organization

• First, the time it takes to develop a new system is a long and tedious process.

•Second, the cost associated with the SDLC process is very high.

• Finally, all information systems do not require such a rigorous SDLC process.

• the SDLC would be overkill for a small-scale decision-making application; therefore, over the years organizations have used rapid approaches to SDLC that are quicker and less-expensive short-cuts to this process. These are called Rapid SDLC approaches.

•One rapid development approach is prototyping

Prototyping

 

Development Life Cycle: Case4-1:Opening Case: of men and mice: a case study

Jackson Laboratory is

•  nonprofit,

•  independent

•  world –reowned

Genetic research institue faunded in 1929.

Located in Bar Harbor,

Budget $80 million,

1200 employee.

•Jackson Laboratory decided to install an ERP system with $5 million budget and a 1 year time frame.

•Despite the installation challenges, the project's actual cost was close to the budget and took only about 6 months longer than expected.

  Major installation challenge was the integration of its unique mouse-development functions into Oracle's ERP system.

   . One of the problems faced by Jackson stemmed from an internal HR issue (i.e., the risk that the action or inaction of the software provider would hinder the implementation)

   modifying the ERP system to accommodate its business process, placing special emphasis on training, seeking a fixed-fee contract with Oracle and purchasing a surety bond to reduce project risk.

•Jackson Lab selected an integrated ERP suite from Oracle rather than a best-of-breed option.

•The Oracle applications suite included modules for process manufacturing, accounting, e-procurement, and HR, among others. Their biggest challenge was modification of the Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) module to accommodate the lab's unique business processes of raising and distributing mice.

The implementation team chose a phased implementation approach instead of a big-bang approach.

 The first phase initially went live in February, including the management of production capacity, accounts receivable, some general ledger functions, and the purchasing of manufacturing material; in April they launched other modules including accounting for research grants, the rest of general-ledger functions, accounts payable, and fixed assets.

For the second phase, which began in June, the remaining modules including process management, human resources, payroll, labor distribution, and a grant filing application were installed

•Jackson faced personnel problems during ERP installation when the best and brightest employees were involved in the implementation process leaving them short-handed to do the everyday work. In addition, Jackson's IT staff lacked experience with ERP, only one person had some experience in installing an ERP. Further cost overruns resulted \ from training, an especially big cost item. The timeand-materials basis contract would have increased the risk of overtime and going over budget because vendors and consultants have an interest in quoting low and seeing the work grow as the project proceeds.

•Jackson faced personnel problems during ERP installation when the best and brightest employees were involved in the implementation process leaving them short-handed to do the everyday work. In addition, Jackson's IT staff lacked experience with ERP, only one person had some experience in installing an ERP. Further cost overruns resulted \ from training, an especially big cost item. The timeand-materials basis contract would have increased the risk of overtime and going over budget because vendors and consultants have an interest in quoting low and seeing the work grow as the project proceeds.

•There is a natural competitiveness between the buyer and the ERP vendor. vendor benefits by placing a "veil of complexity" over their work; the buyer wants to get the system up and running with the least amount of work and customization.

•The service level agreements generay tend to be very complex because much clearer definition of roles and responsibilities between client and service provider is needed. From a consultant's and vendor's perspective, a high (>25 percent) contingency is quite reasonable depending on the nature of the work, whereas this is too much from the buyer's perspective

•Jackson Lab used several strategies to reduce the risk. First, they negotiated a fixed-fee contract with Oracle rather than use the more commonly used time-and-l11aterials contract. Second, they bought a surety bond from Gladwyne, a risk management conSUlting firm. This strategy protected Jackson Lab from the project's cost overruns caused by IT staff being forced to solve the technological challenges with "out-of-the-box thinking." Third, it spent considerable time and effort on changing the business processes and training its employees with the new processes. Finally, they got better cooperation from the vendor, Oracle, by negotiating a fixed-fee contract and a favorable service level agreement. In addition, Jackson Lab should have built a time buffer into their ERP implementation life cycle to avoid the pressure of delivering the system on a predetermined timeline. 

BIDM-1

Data mining 
A process that uses statistical, mathematical, artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques to extract and identify useful information and subsequent knowledge from large databases
How data mining works
Data mining tools find patterns in data and may even infer rules from them
Data mining task can be classified into three main categories:
⦁ Prediction
⦁ Association
⦁ Clustering
Classification 
Supervised induction used to analyze the historical data stored in a database and to automatically generate a model that can predict future behavior
Clustering
Partitioning a database into segments in which the members of a segment share similar qualities

KÜN PARLIYOR!

Merak eden varsa söyleyelim. Kün sönmedi aksine tahmin ettiğimizden daha çok parlıyor.

İnsanlara umut olmak, ışık olmak bu yolda yürümek, verdiğimiz sözleri gerçekleştirmiş olmak, bütün zorluklara rağmen direnmek ve sonunda başarılı olmak. Hepsi baştan sona müthiş bir deneyimdi. Aldığımız hayırlı dualar, öğrendiğimiz onca şey bize şimdi yaşamak için güç veriyor.

Attığımız her adımda, milyonlarca riskle karşılaşmamız olmamıza rağmen Allah'ın rahmeti ile, bu zorlu süreçleri geçtik. Emek verdik, çaba sarf ettik ve Kün'ün parlamasını sağladık. Çok şükür ki ak gönül ile girdiğimiz bu yoldan pak gönül ile çıktık.

Ben tekrar tekrar ekip arkadaşlarıma, hocalarıma, bize inanan, gönül veren herkese teşekkür ediyorum.

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