Mobilizing Intelligent CRM: A New Approach to Mobile Customer Relationship Management

Transcription

1 New Marketing Research Journal Special Issue, May 2012 pp: Mobilizing Intelligent CRM: A New Approach to Mobile Customer Relationship Management S. Hamed Ghanadpour Marketing Manager Tosan Co. Tehran, Iran [email protected] Abstract Customer Relationship Management To build and maintain strong customer relationships, it is critical to provide customers with immediate service on a continuous basis. Customers have come to expect service at any time of day or night. Advantages of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for enterprises, move them to Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ecrm). Nowadays, with development of mobility, mobile applications and mobile infrastructures, Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mcrm) appeared. However, Intelligency is very important to developing the power applications and systems, so intelligent approach in mcrm has special importance. In this paper, you will find an intelligent model for mcrm by mobilizing intelligent CRM applications. There are many approaches to developing a Mobile application. One of the best them is mobilizing available applications. So, when we have an enterprise application as intelligent CRM, for creating an intelligent mcrm, we can mobilize intelligent CRM. Mobilizing intelligent CRM to gain Intelligent mcrm is new approach that presented in this paper. Keywords: Customer Relationship Management, Mobile CRM, Intelligent CRM, Intelligent mcrm

2 82 / New Marketing Research Journal, Special Issue, May 2012 Introduction Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is defined as: a set of business processes that an organization performs to identify, select, acquire, develop, better serve and, above all, retain its most profitable customers. [3] The importance of information technology, especially the growth of the Internet over the past decade, in developing CRM applications for enterprises cannot be overstated. An enterprise wide, integrated CRM is essential for business success and customer retention, given the proliferation of Internet technology, sales automation processes, data-mining tools, and business intelligence applications. Lacking such integration, the disparate customer channels are nothing but costly, ineffective means to address individual customer needs and a drain on corporate resources. The objective of CRM is, on the one hand, to build and maintain customer relationships and to provide value for customers on the other. Despite the potential of traditional CRM to provide value for customers, customers are expecting more and more individual attention.[1] Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ecrm) is defined as: the usage of electronic suites and software for enabling selling and serving customers. [3] Electronic channels include , Web inquiry, online order management, search capabilities, and electronic messaging. Traditional channels include voice inquiry, call center and sales tracking tools. The emergence of ecrm applications, if integrated and architected correctly, will help companies better manage the enterprise wide CRM applications. Leading industry adopters of ecrm applications include financial services, technology, utilities, and telecommunications. Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mcrm) is considered as a powerful expedient to make both the company s and customer s life easier on the daily basis. For example, when a transaction is made a confirmation message (a text message) can be sent with details of the purchase, order reference and contact number. The advantage for the customer is that these details are automatically stored and accessible whenever and wherever needed. In addition, because retaining customers is more profitable than building new relationships, companies are forced to seek novel ways of attracting customers to build relationships with a particular company due to intensified competition throughout different industries. [1] Literature Rewiew Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Misleadingly more and more people only think of a solution system when they hear the buzzword CRM. They forget that first of all CRM should be considered as a strategic requirement for companies to maintain their business. However, companies have developed CRM technologies that serve as gear to connect a company s customers more effectively with the products that the company supplies [7]. When the term CRM is applied, we do not refer to a suite of front-end technology applications, but to the set of strategies and processes that make up

3 Mobilizing Intelligent CRM / 83 the unbelievable revolution of one-toone marketing. Already in 1993 Don Peppers and Martha Rogers visualized something that they referred to as oneto-one-marketing. By definition of them, one-to-one marketing occurs when a business and its customer interact directly, the customer tells the company something about how and when they want to be served, and then the company changes its behavior with respect to the individual customer, based on that interaction [8]. The benefits of CRM are considered to be the opportunity of organizations not only to retain customers, but enabling more efficient marketing by creating intelligent opportunities for cross selling and opening up the possibility of the fast introduction of new brands and products. To be able to obtain these benefits, organizations must be able to customize their product offerings, optimize prices, integrate products and services and deliver on the service promise asked for by the customer base. It should also be recognized that these competencies are all interlinked. Customizing products and services alone would not provide the desired benefits. Linking it with the integration of delivery mechanisms enables crossselling opportunities and reduces the time to market new products and services. Therefore, companies have to understand that the strategy of CRM goes beyond the functions that are usually associated with marketing[4]. It has to involve all various business functions such as customer service, complaint handling, finance, production and delivery, or even sales. If a customer tells a company s sales and marketing front-end what they would like to have changed, the production back-end has to take care of the customer on their input [8]. Simply said, CRM involves far more than the automation of processes in sales, marketing, and services and the increase of the efficiency of these, it engages the performing of interactions with customers on a more informed base and the individual personalization to the customers demand [4]. Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ecrm) CRM combines strategy, process, and technology to manage interactions with customers. Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ecrm) goes a step further and does this through multiple channels (Web, phone, ) with the support of specialized applications. ecrm brings to life the old-fashioned idea of customer service. It is the relationship marketing instrument of the millennium. It allows the firm to simplify and enhance its customer s total experience with the firm. ecrm Definition In simplest term, ecrm provides companies with a means to conduct interactive, personalized and relevant communications with customers across both electronic and traditional channels. It utilized a complete view of customer to make decisions about messaging, offers and channel delivery. It synchronizes communications across otherwise disjoint customer facing systems. It adheres permission-based practices, respecting individuals` preferences regarding how and whether they wished to communicate with you

4 84 / New Marketing Research Journal, Special Issue, May 2012 and it focuses on understanding how the economics of customers relationships affect the business. While the definition above is simple, achieving ecrm itself is hard. For business organizations, evolving to ecrm requires process and organizational changes, a suit of integrated applications, and non-trivial technical architecture to support both the ecrm process and the enterprise applications that automate the process. from CRM to ecrm CRM is essentially a business strategy for acquiring and maintaining the right customers over the longterm. Within this framework, a number of channels exist for interacting with customers. One of these channels is electronic and has been labeled ecommerc or ebusiness. This electronic channel does not replace the sales force, the call center, or even the fax. It is simply another extension, albeit a powerful new one, to the customer. The thrust of ecrm is not what an organization is doing on the web but how fully an organization ties its online channel back to its traditional channels.[5] ecrm employment reasons Optimize the value of interactive Relationships Enable the business to extend its personalized reach Coordinate marketing initiatives across all the customer channels Leverage customer information for more effective emarketing and ebusiness Focus the business on improving customer relationships and earning a greater share of each customer s business through consistent measurement, assessment and actionable customer strategies Mobile Customer Relationship Management (mcrm) New digital marketing channels such as the Internet and mobile phones are considered powerful channels to reach customers because they allow personalization and interactivity of the content and the context of the message [6]. While the Internet as a channel to manage customer relationships (ecrm) has attracted great attention, understanding how to effectively manage customer relationships through mobile medium has gained far less attention, and from marketing perspective we are dealing with an extremely unacknowledged phenomenon. Mobile Customer Relationship Management(mCRM) is a logical extension of Electronic Customer Relationship Management (ecrm). mcrm is an essential component for the completion of the customer relationship channel loop. Sales workforce can access customer information based on location, on demand, and be proactive in initiating alerts and triggers for select customers. The wide range of wireless devices, such as two-way pagers, handheld devices, Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) telephones, wireless , and Java-based applications, enable an array of services for personalized CRM. The emerging m-crm applications also present various challenges: Wireless latency and bandwidth requirements

5 Mobilizing Intelligent CRM / 85 The ability to cater multiple emerging wireless standards for mobile devices Security and privacy issues associated with mobile devices, wireless transmissions, and content ownership. Mobility and CRM What is Mobility? Mobility can be defined as the capability of being able to move or be moved easily. In the context of mobile computing, mobility pertains to people s use of portable and functionally powerful mobile devices that offer the ability to perform a set of application functions un-tethered, while also being able to connect to, obtain data from, and provide data to other users, application, and systems.[9] In order to do so, a mobile device must have certain characteristics. For example, it must be portable and a user must be able to carry it around with relative ease. A mobile device also has to be highly usable and functional, and allow for easy connectivity and communication to other devices. These characteristics are: [9] Portability Usability Functionality Connectability Each of these characteristics is important in its own right but none can genuinely be considered overriding. From a user s perspective, the mobile device or solution that offers the best mobility will generally have some combination of these characteristics. A user may also be flexible about one of the characteristics if there is some corresponding compensatory benefit in another characteristic. For example, a user might allow for some latitude in portability if a mobile device has a great deal of functionality. However, if the device is unusable as a result of its size, the best functionality in the world may not suffice. Client- Server Architecture for Mobile Applications Application architectures are often modeled to highlight or illustrate the overall layout of the software (e.g., application code and platform) and hardware (e.g., client, server, and network devices). While there are many possible combinations of software, application architectures often fall into a series of recognizable patterns. Application architectures are commonly modeled in terms of a clientserver architecture wherein one or more client devices requests information from a server typically responds with the requested information. In this architecture layers are: Presentation 1. Business 2. Data Access And tiers are: 1. Presentation 2. Application 3. Database mcrm Intelligent Model The development of Mobile CRM Applications not only includes creating

6 86 / New Marketing Research Journal, Special Issue, May 2012 a mobile client that communicates with your back-end systems, but often requires modifying and extending your existing CRM Application. When you must have an Intelligent mcrm Application, Because of complexity both intelligency and Mobility, this is the best way. When we mobilize existing Intelligent CRM application architectures, we are attempting to add mobility components to the overall architecture (such as application code, mobile clients and servers). In doing so, we are extending the existing enterprise application services to encompass mobile users as customers. The ability to extend three-tiered web architectures to accommodate intelligent mcrm Applications depends on three major considerations. These considerations are illustrated in the figure 1 and described below. 1. Connectivity. A major consideration when mobilizing your existing Intelligent CRM applications is type of connectivity that you may utilize. In other words, will the mobile customer be always, partially, or never connected? If the mobile user (as customer) will only be partially connected, you will probably need to develop a fat mobile client that primarily works in standalone mode, and only connects to the server for synchronization. In this case, the server s existing web pages may only b minimally affected since the mobile client will require a new application. Much of the connectivity effort will involve the development of a web service that allows communication between the mobile client and the server s business object. If the mobile user will always be connected, however, the server s Presentation Tier will require a new set of pages that can be displayed properly on a thin mobile client through a web or WAP browser.

7 Mobilizing Intelligent CRM / 87 Figure 1. Model of Intelligent Mobile CRM 2.Level of abstraction. If the current level of abstraction in your existing enterprise is quite good, adding mobile applications potentially will be easier because you may be able to reuse the existing business and data access application components. For example, one database may hold customer personal data while another database may hold customer financial account data. In order for your new mobile application to extract, display, and update the information in these systems, you might have to write quite a lot of code. However, if the business

8 88 / New Marketing Research Journal, Special Issue, May 2012 and data access logic already exists, it may be possible to reuse the server code with minor or no modifications. If your existing Intelligent CRM Applications are not well-abstracted, potentially a great deal of work may have to be done. We recommend that you consider this before you attempt to mobilize any existing enterprise applications. 3. Scaled-down version of existing application or new application. A third consideration in mobilizing your existing Intelligent CRM application is what you are actually mobilizing. If you are mobilizing that and your connectivity is partial, the fat client you develop will be scaled-down version of the full server application. However, if you intend to build a new Intelligent mcrm application with business logic that is not currently supported by the server, you will also need to build the server s new presentation, business, and data access logic along with the back-end system interface. Conclusion In this paper, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Electronic CRM (ecrm) and Mobile CRM(mCRM) was defined. So, mobility and mobile application architecture described. We described that one of the best way to developing mobile applications is mobilizing the available applications. Therefore, one of the best approaches to developing an Intelligent Mobile Customer Relationship Management is mobilizing an Intelligent Customer Relationship Management Application defined in this paper as a model. References [1] Jaakko Sinisalo, Jari Salo, Matti Leppäniemi and Heikki Karjaluoto; Initiation Stage of a Mobile Customer Relationship Management, The E- Business Review, Volume V, [2] Jagdish N Sheth, Atul Parvatiyar, G Shainesh; Customer Relationship Management, Emerging concepts, tools and applications ; McGraw-Hill;2003. [3] Prasad Sundararajan; Emerging Mobile Customer Relationship Management Applications in Financial Services ; EAI Journal, May [4] Duc Linh Van Tri ; CRM vs. ecrm From Front Office to No Office, Advance Topic in Information Management Seminar, [5] Kapil Chaturvedi, Snil B Bhatia; ecrm: Deriving Value of Customer Relationship, [6] Kim, Ilchul; Dongsub Han and Don E. Schultz; Understanding the diffusion of integrated marketing communications, Journal of Advertising Research, 44; [7] What is CRM technology?, [8] forum.com/library/csc/csc-003/csc- 003.html, 2001 [9] Peppers, D.; Rogers, M. One to One B2B, Customer Development Strategies for the Business-to-Business World ; [10] Valentino Lee, Heather Schneider, Robbie Dchell; Mobile Applicationns, architecture, design and development ; Prentice Hall; 2004.