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INTRODUCTION The term “customer” was brought up when a business was first started, and yet it took years for companies to really understand what the term means. As the customer role of the relationship expands, suppliers or service providers are inspired to serve them and cater to their needs in exchange for profitable value in the form of money and repeat business. Previously, global brand leaders were acted as the market decider whereby product differentiation and market segmentation was built around the demands of the product rather than the consumer. At that time, products were advertised and distributed geographically to the customers and the choices were very limited. Therefore, global suppliers or service providers became the group of people decided who the customer was and into what category the customer best fit. However, this supplier-consumer relationship has changed and customers require flexibility, creativity, and price advantage from the supplier. In the information age and forever-changing world of the customer wishes and behaviors, customers are more knowledgeable to understand their needs and the matching products or services from the Internet. Therefore, traditional approach to market a product or service to customer has recently evolved and replaced by new relationship technique and strategy. This strategy was named as Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM, also known by other terms such as relationship marketing and customer management, is concerned with the creation, development and enhancement of individualized customer relationships with typically targeted customers that results in maximizing their total customer life-time value [2]. The adoption of CRM in an organization is the recognition of long-term relationships with customers and it is the most important assets for the organization to generate customer ownership that will create competitive advantage and resulting in customer retention and profitability for the company. In this case study, CRM adoption and implementation in one of the Singapore’s international manufacturing company was studied. The interviews were separately conducted to the company’s senior manager of Management of Information System (MIS) department and business users in the CRM teams. The roles of the each CRM teams and their experiences will be shared in this case study. Also, the usage of Information Technology (IT) in the CRM operations will be focused as it has played an important role in the company’s CRM implementation. As different CRM strategies and systems were adopted in different regional (United States, Europe and Asia) service department, this paper will mainly focus on the company’s CRM system implemented in Asia only. INDUSTRY BACKGROUND “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an enterprise approach to understand and influence customer behavior through meaningful communications in order to improve customer acquisition, customer retention, customer royalty, and customer profitability”[1]. Basically, it is the extension knowledge of marketing that related with how to deal customer with the payback on level of customer satisfaction and loyalty. The social relationship is equally important as company’s economic and strategy development. Such relationship is gained from trust, customer loyalty, lower marketing costs and mutual learning. There are some objective points of a CRM process, which are customer retention, customer acquisition and customer profitability. Customer retention is the ability to retain loyal and profitable customers, at the same time lead to business returns. Customer acquisition is by acquiring the right customers, based on common characteristics, which will drive to business margins. Lastly, customer profitability is to increase individual customer margins by offering the right products and services at the right time. In order to approach customers in a more effective and efficient manner, eCRM has been introduced in the early 90’s to integrate the technologies into the business environment to facilitate processes and services required for CRM implementation. In other words, eCRM expands the traditional CRM techniques by integrating technologies of new electronic channels such as web communication, live agent callback, IVR, fax, SMS and e-mail. Also, it involves acquisitions, analysis and use of knowledge about customers from various back-end IT systems to automate sales force, marketing, customer service, and risk assessment in an organization. Currently, the most leading eCRM vendors available in the market are Siebel, Oracle CRM, PeopleSoft/Vantive, Onyx, Nortel/Clarify, MicroStrategy, Kana, BroadVision, Vignette, e.Piphany, e.Gan and ATG. Most of the competitive companies have practiced CRM knowledge. In result, their revenue’s graph spikes up, which proves that this knowledge is very crucial. Numbers of local companies have proven the success of this knowledge implementation, such as SingTel, DBS, UOB and OCBC. These success stories have leaded the interest for other medium companies to make a glance of this opportunity as a pathway of improvement. Internet is one of the success media in this technology era. It has been aggregate with CRM knowledge for excellent CRM implementation as it provides convenience, speed, price, service, and comparability. E-Commerce also plays role to enhance fundamental of CRM knowledge. Eventually, there are no more barriers by combining these two powerful technologies. The success of CRM implementation does not mean that the tool alone can do things by its own. Meanwhile, it still needs the support of conventional customer relationship approach. In details, it points out the necessity to develop the type of relationship even though the customer is in offline mode. By keeping the customers either online and offline, this will lead to long-term customer relationship. COMPANY BACKGROUND The company studied is a global electronic manufacturing firm that founded in Singapore in 1981. The company was initially started by three persons and specialized in manufacturing Chinese data processing products. Now, it has expanded its manufacturing to graphics, storage, computer telephony integration, communications, and video conferencing products. Besides, it also involved in software industry that provides personal entertainment solutions which comprising desktop products, Internet appliances and Internet applications to the customers. Brief information of the company as the year of 2002: - The headquarters and primary manufacturing are based in Singapore with sales and distribution. - Research and development being carried out through an extensive, global network of their subsidiaries that located in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. - Employs more than 4,000 people worldwide. - The company has more than 40,000 retail outlets worldwide that selling its products. - It provides global support to its customers through the multi-tiered channel distribution network that comprises 230 key distributors in more than 80 countries. When the company was first setup in early 1980s, they were suppliers of electronic products to most of the local computer-manufacturing firms as the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturing) partners. In the late 80s, the company’s business has expanded globally to all the countries in the world. Most of the marketing strategies used were combining the effort of the local distributor or partners such as trade shows, promotions and mass media advertisement. Furthermore, when Internet was become more popular in 1990s, the company has setup its own web site that provides online product catalogues, technical support contacts, newsletter subscription and product Knowledge Base to the customers. Currently, the web site was formed with three different sites that were supported by the each region customer service center. Different set of CRM strategies and systems are being adopted at each region. According to the MIS senior manager, they are recently in the process of standardizing the regional CRM systems into a single common platform that located at United State. The main objective of this initiative is to standardize its CRM system in terms of marketing strategy and customer service level that could provide higher customer satisfaction. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT ORGANIZATION Objectives The Company’s first objective in CRM implementation was to have a change in their marketing strategy and sales management from product focus to customer focus. They believed that the changes would bring them the higher return on investment over time as good customer service and management will at least retain the loyal and profitable customers. These groups of customer are willing to pay premium prices for great service and confidence as they have enjoyed in experiencing the product and services provided by the company before. By adopting CRM in their marketing management, the company believed that it will subsequently increases customer profitability by offering the right products at the right time, and it brings back the customer satisfaction on the services provided. Besides customer retention and profitability, acquiring the right customers based on the known or learned characteristics from the CRM will also drive in product growth, gaining competitive advantages and increase the company’s margins. Second objective is to improve company operational efficiency in resources. In the company’s management perspectives, manpower resources were not optimized for the productive functions, as additional resources were required due to the manual-driven processes. In order to meet increasing complexity of product mix and exponential growth in the service level, efficient CRM system is required to assist on the effective resources and operational management. In technological aspect, the company was aiming to build an integrated CRM system that enable a single customer view across all channels for service, sales and marketing.
Approximate Word count = 5827
Approximate Pages = 23.3
(250 words per page double spaced)
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