Reflection 3 - Managing customer satisfaction through CRM

Lecture 3 was quite fun, as Rob explained about the customer data warehouse to facilitate the analytical Customer Relationship Management in order to have better customer management which therefore in turn creates profit for the company.
Customer Data Warehouse can be developed in 2 ways, where it follows either Chris Todman or Kimball’s dimensional approach.
An interesting seminar was also presented by Barry Schwartz at a TED conference who is apparently the author of Paradox of Choice. The main idea of the seminar was to highlight a major issue, where in today’s era of globalisation, many companies are focusing too much in providing more varieties to customers in order to compete with each other and to become profitable in the market. However, Barry understands the situation and therefore confidently presented a totally different approach where it highlights the understanding that more products or choices available in the market do not relate to higher customer satisfaction.
This brings us to another issue, where what if the company must have different kinds of products that they wanted to sell. For example: Phone Company (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, etc), Clothing stores, and etc. In my opinion, a good CRM will be very helpful to be applied in this kind of situation. Why a good CRM is helpful?
Lets just imagine a big telephone company with a lot of plan – Home plan (with so many varieties), Mobile plan (again so many varieties to choose from – $29 dollars Cap, $79 dollars Cap, $150 dollars Cap, and etc). When a customer enters the store, they might have an idea on what type of plan they are looking for. In this scenario, let just say that the customer would like to have a mobile plan, but is confused on the type of mobile phone he wanted to get – the type of plan he wanted to have or etc. In this situation the role of CRM is critical. Instead of marketing the entire mobile plan deals that they have in the store, the sales assistant might start with questions in order to know the customer a little bit better. What type of mobile phone are you looking? Do you use the mobile frequently? Do you prefer to sms or call the person? Have you ever joined us for other mobile phone deals or is it the first time?. If the customer explained that he/she has joined up for mobile phone deal and was dissatisfied, the sales assistant may ask the reason why. This will continue until the sales assistant has the background understanding on what mobile phone deal is suitable for that particular customer.
Say the customer is a student, female, would like a stylish phone, excessive use of mobile phone and prefers to call rather than sms. The sales assistant can therefore choose a Motorola phone which comes up with a $79 dollar monthly cap and the customer get to spend $500 on the telephone call.
Here the role of CRM is highly important as the company would be able to filter many products to several that is best suited to the customer, making them less confused and therefore increases their personal level of satisfaction. With a good analytical CRM, the company can even record the customer information to the system which is then Extracted, Transformed, cleansed, and Loaded into the Customer Data Warehouse for better customer analysis.
In conclusion, a good understanding of the role of CRM is critical as to guide companies in marketing their products to their customers, which is clearly depicted in the mobile phone scenario above. As a result, companies with massive type of products can still reap high amount of profitability that is to be able to sell a product with high level of customer satisfaction.