Tag: CRM

Prof. Satya Sidhartha Panda Bangalore (India) E-mail: /

Abstract

This paper attempts to persuade the banking industry to recognize and Increasing sophisticated approaches and techniques to customer relations, value proposition development and life time value calculation will help companies better in understanding how value should be created for customers and the enterprise. E-business refers to any electronic means of collaboration or coordination between organizations. In simple terms, e-Business is the use of Information Technology to exchange information and conduct transactions among enterprises and individuals, both business to business (b2b) and business to consumer (b2c). With the availability of more affordable e-Business software and service offerings in the market, many enterprises in India are likely to embrace these applications in the near future. When people ask, -What do you mean by CRM?- the literal answer is, -Customer Relationship Management,- but that doesn’t really convey much in terms of what all CRM does for a business. This CRM definition is too narrow to really explain everything the system does if it is working to its fullest potential and is user-friendly enough to expand and grow as a customer-client relationship changes and grows.

CRM is a business philosophy, a bent of mind that aims at understanding and managing the needs of the customers. A successful CRM implementation will enable the marketing people to make quick, informed and intelligent decisions, create cross selling and up selling opportunities, measuring marketing effectiveness in value creation and deliver personalized customer care. The key here is to adopt a truly Customer-Centric approach that touches every point and more importantly every person in the company. Everyone in the company must live and breathe customer focus for CRM to work. Key words : CRM, Value Proposition, Customer Care, Implementation.

INTRODUCTION: Satisfaction drives the engines for business to invest and reap benefits. Satisfaction makes companies to consider their customers as catalyst, towards their growth and prosperity. Most of all satisfaction brings life and business much closer towards moments of worthiness of the time spent. CRM has already made a big impact in the world of customer service and will continue to do so. As more and more companies become customer-centric those that fail to do so will lose competitive advantage. The real value of CRM lies in harnessing the potential of people to create a greater customer experience, using technology of CRM as the enabler. Value creation process is a critical component of CRM as it translates business and customer strategies into specific statements of what value is to be delivered to customers and, consequently, what value is to be delivered to the supplier organisation. The value management process is crucial to transforming the outputs of the strategy development process in CRM into programmes that both extract and deliver value. Only a balanced value exchange will ensure that both parties enjoy a good return on investment, leading to a good long term, profitable relationship. Achieving an ideal equilibrium between giving value to customers and getting value from customers is a crucial component of CRM. Increasing sophisticated approaches and techniques to customer segmentation, value proposition development and life time value calculation will help companies better in understanding how value should be created for customers and the enterprise.

CRM in the broader sense encompasses not only customer relationship management itself but how customer relationship management is handled and the most important elements of a CRM program that are essential to its being successful. The range of CRM software options vary from those that provide simple customer tracking and live chat capabilities to the more complex CRM solutions that can integrate all of the customer relationship data an enterprise has on each client past, present and future in a dynamic information data network. With the advent of better computing and communications technology, the marketplace is loosing all boundaries and country specificities. Limited sources of growth and higher prospect of maturity in local markets mean that companies are increasingly facing the need to operate, compete, and communicate on a global level by sharing knowledge about different cultures, environments, technologies, and customers. Mergers and acquisitions have forced companies to synchronize the existing systems with their new products and features by adopting standard business solutions. Therefore, new products and services are rapidly taking on new global perspectives. E-business applications such as ERP, SCM, CRM, or e-commerce are looked upon as strategic tools for major business improvements, enable the breaking down of boundaries-departmental and geographical. The inherent flexibility of these applications is being leveraged by global companies to implement their global strategies and local tactics by making minor changes in the enterprise solution. Over the past two to three years, e-Business applications such as ERP, SCM, and CRM have witnessed lot of transition globally. Enhanced functionalities and vertical centric solutions have evolved providing companies solutions that cater to their needs even better than in the past. Vendors have even tailor made the solutions to suit not only different business verticals but also business sizes.

Fig. 1. Best-fit sectors for CRM practices and packages

Note: Figure Source from Icicle Consultancy, Mumbai, INDIA

Senior vice president Girish G Vaidya who heads the Banking Business Unit (BBU) at Infosys Technologies says, -In order to provide an end-to-end solution for banks, banking product vendors should have three products-core banking, vertical-specific CRM and risk management software.- Though banks, telcos, and software houses use traditional CRM products, the basic CRM model has problems like not satisfying the vertical requirement, which comes up in the second phase. The vertical CRM provides a 360-degree view of the customer. The Infosys Finacle CRM product is being used by the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. The bank is using all of Infy’s products, including the recently introduced CRM product. Infy has been successful in India too, bagging Unit Trust of India (UTI) as its first Indian customer for Finacle CRM. Infosys is positioning itself as the only vendor that satisfies two of the three requirements of banks, by offering core banking and four specialised products. Infosys recently bought technology from Trivium and created Finacle CRM, a banking-specific CRM product. Vaidya says, -Infy does not have a product for risk management for treasuries but we have alliances to fill up the gap. However, there is a big opportunity in services such as assets liability management and trading risk management.- Business Situation : Keeping in mind the growing financial and banking business ,the company wanted to provide adequate customer services and reporting capabilities .It wanted a powerful,offordable and scalable customer relationship Management Solutions . Benefits : Flexible and customizable soluations Increases Business opportunities Secures customer information Improves Business management Simplifies development The CRM soluation provided basic insights into following common modules and functionalities developed by Religare technnova specifically for capital market / brokerage : Lead management Contact management Channel partner management Campaign Reporting automation /compliance reporting automation The company found that the Dynamics CRM 4.0 Platform provided the perfect frame wok on which it could build such a comprehensive and customized CRM Solution , because Dynamics CRM is built on a sophisticated line -of-business application platform; It provides the basic required services upon accountable for new leads and manage the process through entire customer management life cycle .

Secures Customer Information : As the Bank handles a large number of financial translations ,security of data is absolutely essential .For each department, different segments are created so that, only that segments can access the data .A concerted effort was made to import logic as well.Such as end-to-end metadata relationships and improved workflow, have helped the company to streamline business operations and provide an integrated view and functionality to its employees across the country .

A. From the point of view of Business Firms: How business firms perceive CRM, What gadgets are used by the business firms to create CRM How do business firms create value in their offers How business firms assess the effectiveness of CRM Programmes Role of electronic devices in managing customer relations and value chain Problems faced by business firms in managing customer relations and value chain The future of CRM and Value Chain B. From the point of View of Customers: How do customers perceive CRM How do customers perceive Value Customer satisfaction with regard to CRM and Value Customer Behavior towards firms offering high value versus low value Customer loyalty and CRM Customer irritation with CRM Programmes Customers problems and CRM Customer compatibility and convenience with eCRM Expectations of customers for CRM and Value Chain Management Customer rating of various firms on CRM and Value Creation C . From the point of other parties: Role of government in CRM and Value Chain Management Role of Social and Consumer Organisations in CRM and Value Chain Management Availability of necessary infrastructure for CRM CRM Software Multinational Corporations and CRM CRM and Value Chain Management in Globalised World International Legislation and CRM The overall end-user understanding of e-Business applications and its capabilities in the Indian enterprises is very low. Strategic steps are being taken by enterprises to educate the market, but it is a long time still before majority of the end-users attain certain minimum understanding of e-Business applications and its benefits.Low awareness can be tackled by educating the end users, but what compounds the problem is faster spread of failure stories. Fallacy of faster communications medium has affected technology products the most as low educated end users fall prey of these non-successful stories Service is becoming the key to differentiation and this is driving corporates to adopt CRM solutions. Vendors, both domestic and international, are making their presence felt in the Indian sub-continent either directly or through multiple partners. Given the high churn rate in the telecom sector, an increased demand for CRM solutions is witnessed in this sector. Some of the prominent telecom players in the Indian market that have gone in for these solutions are Bharti, BPL, and Orange. Retail sector is also showing strong demand for CRM solutions.There has been slow uptake in the demand for c-commerce solutions in the Indian market. Most of the organizations are still evaluating the efficacy of other e-Business applications such as ERP, SCM, and CRM before going in for these relatively new generation applications. An interesting point to take into consideration is that product development management (PDM) solution and product lifecycle management (PLC) solutions are gaining acceptance in the Indian market. In order to ensure successful implementation of e-Business applications, some of the key issues that needs to be taken into consideration are: The first and foremost pre-requisite is that the enterprise should have a very strong business focus and genuine need for the solution. The consulting partners should have adequate experience in handling projects of a diverse nature. In order to gain end-user confidence, successful stories and case studies needs to be showcased by the vendors. Setting the user expectations right in the first instance Conducting a detailed business and functional requirement analysis Conclusion : The demand for ERP solutions in India is likely to be driven by both the large organizations and SMEs. However, the awareness level and application adoption rate is relatively high amongst the large enterprises as compared to the SMEs. An interesting point to note here is that majority of the top tier companies (organizations with annual revenues in excess of $500 million) in the country have already gone in for ERP implementation. Thus, the real potential lies in the SME segment, which offers tremendous opportunity for the ERP vendors operating in the country. Banking and finance clearly are the better exponents of e-Business applications and have made the best use of enterprise applications in rolling out the e-strategies. Technology has played a key role in this industry, although a large amount of public sector banks in India still are in the early phase of e-Business application adoption, the leaders in this sector are as technology savvy, as in any other industry. Private sector banks are typically using technology and better customer services to match the heavy penetration of public sector banks. As a result, CRM and core banking applications have penetrated private banks more than the public sector banks for -Customer relations-, their -satisfaction- and right way to manage the expectation of your existing and new Customer. I am confident that banks and other financial institutions will meet these challenges head on, continue to find new and better ways to put technology to their and their customers’ best use, and that they will manage the technology and business risks associated with these investments.