Customer Relationship Management

Recently I happened to do shopping at one of the major retailer in India and was exposed to the latest trend in marketing - Collaboration between diverse industries!  Typically, we are mostly price conscious and are mostly bargain hunters. Guess what, the first unpaid mobile service being launched by the most innovative retail player in the market.

Yes, you guessed it right T24. So how does this model work? Typically we do shopping at mom and store and get some minimal price discount. So if we club together the entire price discount and do shopping at one location, we get a sufficient amount equivalent to the typical Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) figure in telecom industry. This is an innovative model. The retailer is able to retain their existing customer base of loyal customers and motivates the customer to stock or buy at a slighter higher than usual market basket volumes. The discount offered on the market basket, has slabs equivalent to call time (free talk time). Additionally for the retailer new customer base is created, with larger customer segment moving to the retailer store to do their shopping. The shelf space is getting consumed at rapid pace, so that all the FMCG players are happy. The retailer is able to use the newly launched direct communication link with the customer base, with targeted marketing offers - customized and location sensitive.

Now, let us look at this model from the participating telecom provider perspective, every location coverage area (circle in telecom parlance) has had tie up with the new entrants collaborating with the retailer. These telecom providers is now able to push volume sales of pre-paid services to customers, as they had larger unutilized network space, that could be offered to the customer e.g. less clogged lines (minimal subscribers). This innovative model allows the new entrant obtaining a larger ARPU without any marketing effort and also creates a loyal set of customers, who may subscribe to value added services. We can see, mass migration of existing user base from top service providers to the entrants telecom provider base.

So what does this blog imply, it states that collaboration between diverse industries offers possibility to push products in an already saturated market.  This is a case of business innovation, with SAAS as the underlying model. For the retailer the marketing platform has been pushed to the telecom provider, with a hosted in the cloud model. Yes, the limit to such collaboration is limited by our imagination. So let us imagine a better world.

Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We often come across the saying referred by marketers - Innovation is the key to success. In this highly evolving world economy and with ever increasing consumer demand it is expected that the products evolve to meet consumer needs. There is a shift in what was considered the basic need for the consumer. 30 years back a telephone or AC or refrigerator was considered as a luxury and fell under the category of good to have products. With more and more people moving across cities and globe, telephone has become a necessity that can no more be ignored. With increasing temperatures and prolonged summers ACs and refrigerators are no more luxuries but have become the basic necessities for the tropical countries. This can be applied for almost all the products and industries. About 15 years back the user using the CRM system had a basic need to say access the information on net. With time customers want more and more transactions that can be handled online and which are both time saving and cost effective. More and more organizations are moving towards the CRM regime where user friendly transactions and facilities are made available online.

We understand that the innovation no doubt is the key to success but there are some of the other important factors that need to be considered before launching new products.

Firstly the time of launch is very important. At times there are new products that evolve with the speed that would be much higher than the consumer can catch up or expect. Say if the 3G/4G technology or I phones would have been introduced 15 years back when the consumer was adapting to the pager technology and had still to catch with the mobile evolution, then it would have not only been a disaster but would have been a complete failure. It took almost 11 years from the time cellphones made their debut till the time they became established. Companies must give time to the consumers to get used to and adapt to the innovations before providing add on to these innovations.

Secondly the group of user with whom the innovation is first launch is also critical. There is a group of users that keeps an eye on the latest technology and is the first to adopt the change. The social need, economic status, education, personal believes etc play a critical role in adopting a new technology. Once established and effectively promulgated, it takes little to time for the innovation to reach masses and get established.

Thirdly it should be noted that not all innovations click the markets and the marketers should be ready for the same.  Some of the statistics are as below:

• Out of 11000 products launched by 77 companies, only 56% are present five years later - Kuczmaski & Associates
• Only 8% of new product concepts offered by 112 leading companies reached the market. Out of this 83% failed to reach marketing objectives -Group EFO Ltd., Marketing News, Feb 1, 1993
[ Source: http://www1.ximb.ac.in/users/fac/MNT/mnt.nsf/23e5e39594c064ee852564ae004fa010/7be87590e776a881e5256ab500389b77/$FILE/Intoduction%20to%20CB.ppt]

So what goes wrong with the innovations here? The answer to this is that the products either fail to fulfill the basic need of the consumer or are too overpriced that the consumer does not see any value for money in the purchase.

Innovation no doubt is a powerful tool in the hands of the marketers but more important is to understand the consumer behavior and the right usage of the tool. Failures in market not only incur financial losses to the corporates but at times also erodes the first mover advantage that the companies can gain with a successful invention.

Posted by Anshul Tiwari at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of my earlier posts, importance of people, process and technology in any CRM application implementation is mentioned (ref). Some of the comments received for this post include on the strategy of data/information. I certainly liked this point and being in data modeling for quite some time and responsible for the data modeling in my present consulting work, I want to share a few points with my experience or knowledge in this post.

It is certain that any CRM application implementation involves data migration either from excel worksheets to the application chosen or from one CRM application to another. I generally observed that the migration team starts mapping the source data to the destination data and coming up with transformation rules for ETL tool. But I think there are a few steps to be done ahead of the data mapping exercise.

These steps include
1) Create data dictionary and identify the entities

2) Identify the source of reference data - Who provides the source data and how they provide/manipulate it.  Is it the CRM business administrators or database administrators of IT applications? Who authorizes the reference data items? Eg. Customer Types - dividing the customers into different types and their categories.

3) Confirm with the business how do they think that the data is presently modeled/represented. The business community might be unhappy with particular set of data items or categorization or attribute information. It might be because of the poor data model in the present application and we need to standardize that in the new application.

4) Draft the different actions on the data/information by different process steps to understand how the data is being used and manipulated. This will determine the quality of the data. which is another important factors.

5) Obtain the data models from the product vendors and then start next level of data model (extensions of data base tables and creation of customized tables/columns) in the destination application's database. This is to be done in two layers (logical and physical).The logical models should be represented with UML diagrams. Recently I was involved in a data modeling discussion in the Tele Management Forum which lead to 79 threads and where the experts were arguing on a modeling point. Please refer the link (might need login access).

6) Design the database based on the above inputs and start normalizing this model to ensure that the business is comfortable in viewing/modifying the data, functionality and process steps are not changed and not impacted. In this phase it is always better to come up with ER diagrams of the customizations.

Post these steps comes the actual data migration steps where the confirmed and signed-off data architecture/design is to be mapped from the source to target. This means the design stage of any implementation stage should think about data design and part of it should be on migration also.

How far these design steps are given importance in a CRM implementation project's life cycle? I would say less importance when compared the functionality and process steps/tasks being designed, documented and tracked. To avoid any major data issues during testing stage it is always better to have a complete design and follow the above steps mentioned.
 

It would be great to know the experiences from you also and share proactive design steps to be taken.

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 5:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)