Reflection 1 – Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers

During Lecture 1, Customer Relationship Management can be viewed as a strategy that is needed to be critically emphasized through obtaining, retaining, and establishing a long term relationship with profitable customers in order to be profitable in the market industry.

In an article entitled “Get Inside the Lives of Your Customers”, which was published in May 2001, Patricia B. Seybold explained the need to focus on “Customer Scenarios” as a tool for CRM where it takes into account broader mindset of an organization in relation the customers’ shopping pattern – How do customers select, buy, and use the products & services. Furthermore, combined with the capability of internet technology as an interactive, effective, and non – costly means of interactions between customers and the organizations, businesses are most likely to reap the long term benefit as experienced by National Semiconductor, Tesco, and Buzzaw.com.

However, although creating customer scenarios may be viewed as a tool which involves designing or following certain steps or specific methodologies, I personally believe that instead of considering it as a tool, customer scenarios must be viewed as a strategy that is supported by various tools such as: Internet Technology, Data Warehouse, and etc. This differentiation is resulted because in my opinion, the word strategy refers to the things that add value to support the conducts of an organization; whereas the word tool refers to the things that provide support to the establishment of the strategy.

It is also quite interesting to note that the author actually viewed the creation of customer scenarios in a quite straightforward and easy to solve environment rather than complex and ever-changing environment. I personally believe that in dealing with customers, people within an organization should be exposed to a complex and unpredictable environment as every customers’ expectations, wants, needs, and therefore shopping patterns are different. Thus, the scenario built must be able to match various customers’ demands exposed.

Another main issue is the fact that the methodology used in creating the customer scenarios did not take into account customers’ point of view in relation to their shopping pattern. Instead, it merely emphasized on peoples ability to be able to put themselves in the customers’ shoes. In my opinion, this statement contradicted the main idea of the article, where it should stressed the needs to analyze customers’ shopping pattern in a broader mindset. Without proper analysis on the users’ purchase pattern, it would be difficult or almost impossible to create a good customer scenarios as a form of strategy to support an appropriate and effective CRM.

Creating customer scenarios can be viewed as one critical strategy that supports a good CRM. But I truly believe that the way to improve CRM is not restricted to the development or creation of customer scenarios. Instead, we should make full use of the technology that is available in today’s world, such as the capabilities of Data Warehouse, Data Mining, and etc to create a prospective strategy that would be useful to support an appropriate and effective CRM.