Reflection 6 - CRM in Organizations

In lecture 6, Rob discussed 3 major topics in relation to CRM. They are:

1. The application of Data Mining Tools in the Industry
2. How to best select CRM tools
3. The implementation of CRM in Organizations, which is reflected in 2 case studies.

Firstly, CRM can be defined as an overall business strategy that needs to be implemented in order to have better understanding about the customers. In order to achieve its objective, it must incorporate some of the following:

1. Customer Data Collection and warehousing
2. Data Mining
3. Sales automation (electronic ordering)
4. Marketing automation
5. Call centre management
6. E-mail tracking

To integrate Data Mining capability in order to support an effective CRM, Oracle launched its product entitled "Siebel Campaign Management Software". As advertised by Oracle, its campaign management software will seek to automate and integrate planning, execution, assessment, as well as refinement of marketing campaigns. It is presented in the form of Workflow, dashboard, and easy-to-read report to allow users to have better understanding of the situation which would therefore improve the analysis for better marketing.

However, software selection must not heavily rely on vendors' advertisement as they are most likely to oversell the product. To avoid future conflict, it is therefore advised to ask vendors to perform demonstration of software prototypes using your own data sets. This strategy is crucial to be implemented as vendors will be more comfortable in working with their sets of data due to their familiarity of the scenarios which would therefore allow them to easily navigate their data as well as to market their product to their prospective customers.

In my opinion, this is one of the main issues that should not be ignored by organizations as they might get caught by the professionality of the vendors as well as the functionality of the technology during the software presentation. One possible issue that may emerge from this situation is when the promised functionality do not work as intended using the organizations' sets of data which will then cause disappointment or possibly termination of the overall project that can be very costly (waste of Money, Time, and Resources).

Before the end of the lecture, Rob told us an interesting example of Failed CRM Implementation in City Council in UK.

According to my opinion, failed implementation of CRM in City Council was driven by lack of focus and commitment from the senior management. It is clearly depicted in the scenario, where there were 2 clashing goals from both business-people and IT-people. Accordingly, IT-related people had a vision that is to integrate the legacy system in order to minimize overall management as well as to achieve a coordinated Enterprise system. It differs to what the business-related people had in mind, as they were more concern with "answering calls" as opposed to the Integration idea. Moreover, with the Change of CIO in 2001, the project became more business focus, resulting in lack of commitment with overall integration of the system and thus become more focus on collecting lots of data about customers and using that data to shape services in the future.

The second major issue relates to the use of Outsourcing strategy. As noted in the case study, there are several problems with City Council CRM Implementation Outsourcing strategy.

1. Little consultation about outsourcing strategy with internal departments.
2. Lack of in-house expertise. This would create major problem as outsource expertise does not know how the organization operates, the reporting structure within the organization, as well as the knowledge of data that is kept and presented to the users.
3. Lack of communication between internal employees and external employees.
4. Lack of knowledge in relation to the integration tool to support communication between both CRM software and back-end systems.
   

In addition, other issues such as: improper staff management along with possible political issue had proven to highly contribute the failed implementation of City Council CRM system.

From the above insights, it can be concluded that there are several basic things that must be considered to prevent CRM project failure. They are:

1. Overall commitment from Senior Management (Define the goal of CRM system, state it in the project vision, Implement it properly)
2. Balance the team (External from outsourcing department and internal. Ensure active communications between two groups).
3. Proper staff management (staff must be treated properly to ensure project success)
4. Minimize and try to resolve promptly any political issues emerged.

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