Customer Relationship Management

By Atin Harsh Bhola

In the last part, we discussed the supply chain pain points that modern enterprises face. In this part, we will look into the key supply chain practical issues and their MDM solutions.

Practical supply chain issues and their MDM solutions
Practical issue 1: A retailer's distribution center (DC) in X city has its operations shut down for an extended period of time due to a hurricane. Unfortunately, the retailer is unable to shift distribution for those regional stores because its store-order codes are a combination of item codes and the supplying DC's codes. Changing the distribution channel requires changing the order guides, which for most organizations is a herculean task. The delay leads to empty shelves, lost sales, unhappy customers and irreparable brand damage.

MDM solution (Responsiveness): Sound master data can source items from  anywhere to anywhere at the touch of a button because all data around items, suppliers, contracts and sites have been uncoupled from their source This enables the retailer to easily reconfigure the data so that store-order codes are a combination of uniform item codes and the new supplying DC's codes.

Practical issue 2: Customer A goes to a grocery store to pick 8 items that are needed for dinner that evening. One of the most important item is out of stock in the store. The customer abandons the shopping cart and leaves without purchasing a single item. To this customer, purchasing all eight items in one store is a more attractive option than waiting in checkout lines at two different stores To the retailer, this out-of-stock led to the lost sale of eight items and a very dissatisfied customer
MDM solution (Reduced Out of Stocks): Out-of-stocks are inextricably linked to poor forecasts in 47 percent of cases. And poor forecasts are often the result of data inaccuracies in retailers' supply chain, merchandising and inventory systems--precisely the kind of inaccuracies that master data management helps prevent. An MDM implementation ensures that the inventory is correctly tracked and orders are placed accurately in advance to meet the demand. Since MDM implementation ensures that the customer, supplier, product, BOM data is correct, accurate forecasting also enables the correct value of safety stock to be maintained for changing demands.

Practical issue 3: A northern regional buyer of a multinational organization purchases a large volume of jackets from a vendor named 'Cook & Wilson Outfitters'. This allows him to negotiate a favorable deal with the vendor. Another southern regional buyer of the same MNC purchases a large volume of the same product from the same vendor. However, in the southern regional system, this vendor's details are entered as "C&W Outfitters." Because the vendor description is not uniform between the two systems, the southern buyer is unable to negotiate an advantageous price based on total volume purchased by the MNC as a whole
MDM solution (Cost Reduction): An MDM implementation ensures that the product codes appear uniform throughout the applications used by an organization. Since MDM serves as a central repository, any changes done to the product code/value through any applications comes to MDM. MDM validates the change and applies data quality rules so that the most trusted version of the product code/value appears in MDM hub. This cleansed and standardized product data is then published to the relevant applications using this data through real time/batch framework so that the most trusted version of product data appears uniformly in all the applications 

Practical issue 4: A fast food company X is a competitor of a company Y.Company X finds that in order to compete, it has to improve value/revenue generated against some of its low revenue yielding products
MDM solution (Additional Revenues): With MDM implementation, a company may discover that in the northern region, customers who buy boneless chicken also buy a marinade 43 percent of the time.With that information, the retailer can craft a campaign to help drive sales of a slow-moving marinade while increasing the average customer sale.

About the Author: Atin Bhola is a consultant working on SCM domain having 5  years of IT experience. He has worked on oracle applications (distribution modules) and also in MDM domain (Siebel UCM).

Posted by Guest Blogger at 1:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richy Yati Mishra

In the last part, we discussed about how CRM is bound by the feeling of the consumers. To understand the same, we tried to focus on the 7 O's framework of consumer behaviour on which the marketing managers rely on for establishing a strong relationship with their customers. In this part, let us try and analyze on the basis of the 7 O's framework how the atom of CRM - feeling plays a key role in the relationship management of the customer.

(1) Occupants: Who constitutes the feelings?
In this we have to identify who all are the stakeholders for whom any change in the business will link to their feelings. It may be the end-user for whom end-user application may be changing. It may be the manager for whom efficiency of the team will be increasing or it may be the owners of the organization for whom profit is increasing.

(2) Object: What does the customer feel?
This is very interesting for an IT industry because, given that our products are intangible in nature, the question comes how can an intangible product make a customer feel better? It is not the product rather the experience that will make the customer feel better. The marketer should always (or most of the times) come with a demo for product. Let the customer know what is going to be created in coming months; how the solution is going to change his present business style. The demo will take him to that phase where he can experience the end product which will make him feel better.

(3) Objectives: Why does the customer feel?
Here we have to identify what is it that matters most to the customer? For example, is it speed for some application or the efficiency of it? What is the objective of the customer and what are the key core values he is looking into? If we improve or can add value to that particular thing then definitely customer will feel good.

(4) Organizations: Who participates in feeling?
We have to identify who all will be participating when we will be proposing the solution. Then we have to identify and do something so that each one of them will be feeling better. There should be something for all to celebrate and this collective celebration will rise to stronger relationship.

(5) Operations: How does the customer feel?
In this we have to concentrate how to make the customer feel better.

(6) Occasions: When does the customer feel?
We have to identify/create occasions when the customer will feel better. The day, on which we are proposing a solution, how can we make it a great occasion for him? From the start time to the end till the time we deliver the product -should create an occasion when the customer will feel better.

(7) Outlets: How we present our feelings to customer?
How we present our feelings to our customers matters a lot. Starting from the way we present to the way we show our feelings (caring) towards the customer can play a decisive role in the customer's feelings and thereby our relationship with him.

If we notice keenly, then we will understand that this is all about CRM. We do mostly the above things for CRM which make me to believe that feeling is the key and it matters most. But one question left with me and I want you to take it with you... and that is, do we need to learn Customer Feeling Management? What sensory branding has done in marketing field, are we going to see a similar transformation in CRM too with Feeling Management?

About the author: Richy Yati Mishra is an associate consultant working for CRM domain; focus on go-to-market CRM solutions. He has more than 3 years of experience in IT industry.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Atin Harsh Bhola

Many companies have IT systems that are inflexible, antiquated and are difficult and expensive to enhance, maintain and support. Such organizations have difficulty managing the data associated with their operations. Data ownership, fragmentation across systems, multiple points of failure and data inconsistency is among the problems that lead to product quality and recall situations in their supply chain. Master Data Management can be effectively leveraged to solve these issues through data standardization, data integrity and presenting a single source of truth. The blog provides a brief of the typical pain points that the complex supply chains of the companies today face.

In order to simplify the explanation, the blog provides some practical examples and the resolution of the issues through master data management. The blog also summarizes the business benefits that master data management could offer. Finally the blog provides a brief of MDM solution that could effectively tackle the typical issues in supply chain through cleaning, consolidating, governing and sharing of master data and also talks about supplier hub solution and its benefits.

Supply chain pain points

Companies today foresee the following pain points in their supply chain

Slow supply chain responsiveness: 

Ø  Slow response to any change upstream or downstream.

Cost reduction:

Ø  Incapability to reduce the costs of procurement by getting a better price from the supplier based on the total volume purchased.

Out -of-stocks: 

Ø  Poor forecasts due to  data inaccuracies in the supply chain leading to stock outs

Slow product/price updates causing revenue leakage: 

Ø  Increased complexity in the supply chain and the increased number of systems involved leading to difficulty in publishing product/price updates to all the relevant systems in a timely manner. This results in loss of revenues and inconsistencies in supply chain.

Cost of error:

Ø  Inconsistencies/duplicates in vendor, product or customer data causing considerable loss of revenues.

Data consolidation from M&A:

Ø  Difficulty in consolidating product, vendor and customer data after a merger or acquisition leading to business disruption.

Having analyzed the pain points of supply chain, in the next part, we will look at the practical issues of SCM and their MDM solutions.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

By Richy Yati Mishra

Customer Relationship Management... Some say it's a strategy and some say it's a process. It is an art or even could be science of understanding the customer behavior. However, in essence what is common is that we need to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors; we need to develop a strong relationship with customer. And through this the overall goal is to find, attract and win new clients, farm and retain existing clients, get the old clients back and reduce marketing expenditure.

Posted by Guest Blogger at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The last 5 years have seen an exponention growth of internet as a medium and a boom in social networking services. Since then, companies are leaving no stone unturned to utilize this opportunity to be constantly in-touch with their customers. Product announcements, event invitations,product reviews etc. have all gone 'social'. But, there is a fine line between customer connect and spamming your customers through emails, status updates, tweets and the like.

So, what would be the one factor that differentiates a piece of information between spam and a 'like'able post? In my opinion, the answer would be relevance. While one may be inclined to think that most of the communication may be subscription based. That is, a customer chooses to receive certain updates by subscibing to a blog stream, agreeing to receive email updates or being fans of a facebook page. However, ones a person has consented, he starts receiving ALL updates regardless of his preferences, buying behaviour or availability. Hence, despite the advantages, social media applications risk being overused and resultantly lead to marketing fatigue.

I think, this impasse can be resolved by intelligently using customer analytics and targeting for social media. There are quite a few companies who have started targeted email marketing. I myself have been involved in couple of such implementations. Targeting is an obvious activity in one to one marketing like emails, sms, telecalling and direct mailers. Newspapers, TV commercials, billboards are outside the purview of targeting because these are broadcasting channels. Social media lies somewhere in between. Something I would like to call selective broadcasting. For example a facebook page is public but the updates are available to only those who subscribe. It is the subscribed material where careful targeting should come into play.

To achieve this, social marketing needs to be married with customer analytics. When a customer subscribes to a feed from any of the social platform, the updates that go to her should be driven by the customer's profile. The profile may be bilt using competitive analytics on demographic data, purchase history and even social media interactions. There are certain characteristics of social networks like hashtags or mentions that may be used to define a customer profile. I haven't seen of an application that fulfills this need. While many try to get there by the way of integration, I think this should be built as a stand alone product or a module.

Do you think there is a market out there for something like this? What could be the challenges of building an application

like this?

Posted by Laukik Desai at 5:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We all talk, debate, advocate for Customer Satisfaction, as the key to business success. Steve Jobs was a true example for always aiming at and also achieving Customer Delight, through his innovative, yet user-friendly/exciting products, from Apple, like iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, to name a few.

While most of Apple's competitors were working towards customer satisfaction, Steve Jobs positioned Apple, way ahead, by designing, developing and offering them products, which were actually exceeding customers' expectations, in terms of the innovative concept, product look and feel, exciting features, which together created the WoW factor, making the users of Apples products, die-hard fans of it.

Being part of the Infosys Labs Mobility Solutions Group, I get to use iPhone and iPad for our Mobile Application Development and Demos to our Clients, it's truly fascinating experience for both developers and users of iPhone and iPad iOS based mobile applications. I also have my family, friends and colleagues advocating for Steve Jobs and his innovative creations, which has excited them.

Steve Jobs has always kept his eyes and ears open to gather new ideas, by observing things around him in his day today life and in thinking about the best possible ways to apply these ideas to create products in Apple, which would offer an exciting, yet simple and rich user experience.

With iPod, Apple really changed the life of music lovers, by enabling them to have this compact device to store and listen to their favorite music, moving them from bulky cassette and disc players. Whatever, traditional mobile phone companies could not do for numerous years, with their thousands of different models of mobile phones, Steve Jobs/Apple, did with it with iPhone, just one model, which become a Multi-purpose Smart Device - Mobile Phone, Camera, Music/Video Player/Recorder, Gaming Device, Application/Computing Device, to name a few. When we were young, we used to learn with slate and chalk piece, today children learn with iPad. Having started with iPad, its touch/orientation features, children (even adult), do not prefer to use any other device (Laptops/Computers), which do not support these features. There is a huge fan club for iMac Machines, who consider them as an inevitable part of their life. These are just a few example of the impact of Steve Jobs and Apple on Customer Delight.

Creation of Pixar Animation Studios and some of the best animation movies (like Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E), which both children and their parents enjoyed together are a distinctive proof of Steve's creative skills, resulting in master pieces, which fascinated people across all ages, young to old.

It is said that even during his last days in the hospital, he was mentioning about better design for the oxygen mask, which only goes to show his passion for design excellence, from the end user or customer perspective.

Steve Jobs is often compared with other great inventors like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. The strength of Steve Jobs was not just coming out with innovative ideas, but also realizing them into excellent products and successful business, which clearly highlights his execution/entrepreneurship skills.

Normally, when a successful CEO of an organization passes away, the sales would take an immediate dip, as customers and shareholders would be worried about the future of that organization. But when Steve Jobs passed away, the customers/fans bought more and more Apple products, which were a brain child of Steve Jobs, as a mark of their respect for him, which indeed increased the sales significantly.

Steve Jobs has always kept the Customer or End User in the mind, while designing innovative products and solutions. He and his team had mastered the art of simplifying the complex technologies, with the easy user interface and rich user experience. The success of Steve Jobs is attributed to his Customer focused approach, well complimented by innovation and excellence in product design, which ultimately led to some of best creations, which instigated Customer Excitement.

When it comes to Customer Delight, we have lots to learn from Steve Jobs and follow his footsteps. Please share your thoughts...

Posted by Shanmugam Gnanasambandam at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)