It Strategy And Planning Essay, Research Paper

IT Strategy and Planning

Activity 1 – Research the CSF of organisations providing CRM technology or supporting such databases.

The definition of Customer Relationship Management is providing exceptional customer service. This entails rapid responses to all customer inquiries and demonstrations of active concern for customer satisfaction. CRM is a comprehensive sales and marketing approach to building long term customer relationships and improving business performance. It is a way of helping an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized way. For example, an enterprise might build a database about its customers that described relationships in sufficient detail.

The best Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems include:

1) The ability to provide faster response to customer inquiries

2) Increased efficiency through automation

3) Having a deeper knowledge of customers

4) Getting more marketing or cross-selling opportunities

5) Identifying the most profitable customers

6) Receiving customer feedback that leads to new and improved products or services

7) Doing more one-to-one marketing

8) Obtaining information that can be shared with the company’s business partners.

How Siebel’s Critical Success Factors assists in the internal growth of the company and their competitive advantage.

Siebel Systems enable organizations to create a single source of customer information that makes it easier to sell to, market to, and service customers across multiple channels, including the Web, call centers, field, resellers, retail, and dealer networks. This is done by providing a comprehensive family of multichannel eBusiness applications and services.

Built on a proven, component-based architecture, Siebel eBusiness Applications are designed from the ground up to be completely Web-based, deliver support for multiple computing platforms, and provide automatic upgrades and software distribution that significantly reduce the total cost of ownership. By using the web Siebel use a common channel to market their wares which financial feasible, considering the amount of information they have to make available to existing and potential customers.

The fact that one of their CSF’s is to satisfy customers through any service channel, is an advantage that would benefit Siebel in terms of internal growth and competition. Since they have such a multiplicity of service channels incorporating many aspects of customer cohesion, they have a competitive edge over other companies offering the same services.

How Siebel address it’s clients needs

- Siebel eBusiness Applications allow organizations to create a single source of customer information that makes it easier to sell to, market to, and service customers across multiple channels, including the Web, call centers, field, resellers, retail, and dealer networks. The multiplicity of the informative avenues that they provide is very compatible with whatever variety of customers they may come into contact with.

- They provide support for all the major computing platforms including mobile clients, connected clients, thin clients, and handheld clients.

- Create a single source of customer and product information that can be used to tailor product and service offerings to meet the unique needs of each customer across all channels of customer interaction

- Deliver the only integrated, multichannel, Web-based configuration solution that is easy to use, deploy, and maintain

Critical Success Factors of Claritas

Claritas is a provider of marketing data. This data is arranged so that their customers can more easily initiate contact with customers in whatever field they choose to apply. Their users can target their own consumer needs so that the product or service they use can be tailored to fit the desired customer. The vast areas that their data covers i.e. trends, geographical locations and important events, ensures that they offer the best service possible for the service that they are offering which is a resource for marketing needs. This is a competitive advantage and as their clients speak of their efficiency to colleagues, this can only mean internal growth in favour of the company.

How it addresses clients needs

Claritas addresses its clients needs by combining customer data with unique market information and insights enabling its clients to systematically identify, quantify, reach, and retain their most profitable customers.

Their ways of doing this are by providing geodemographic information, qualitative audience research, and highly detailed data on advertising spending across all media. This is a main Critical Success Factor. It involves providing customers with all the information that is available and necessary to gain and retain customers.

Siebel and Claritas combined

The service Siebel offers is providing comprehensive application software that can reach a plethora of customers by travelling through many avenues such as the Web, field, retail networks. This service can be improved by Claritas marketing data which can help direct Siebel’s customers to choose the appropriate channel to reach the customers through. In layman terms, Claritas provides the information about the customers and Siebel provides the means in which to contact the customers. This can help both companies and allow them to mutually benefit from each other’s strengths.

What is a call centre infrastructure?

The call centre is a central information point, which the rest of the company can use to gather data about the relationship between companies, products and customers. Murphy Brewery has 9,000 customers base. The problem with them is that their customers were presented with various points of contact within our organization without any one individual taking responsibility for a specific order, query, or request. Customers found that their requests and queries often went unresolved. This information was derived through conducting a self-commissioned survey.

The solution was to establish a Customer Care service, i.e. a call centre, that would integrate all concerned information for any agent dealing with a customer. By understanding how customer trends are moving, a company can control the bases of their existence, their customers, and thus maintain a competitive edge over their rivals like Murphy Brewers. This relates to CRM because it is providing the best customer service possible by knowing the customer needs.

Activity 2: A Power Analysis of your position

Activity 3: Research Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Benchmarking.

The definition of ERP is an attempt to integrate all departments and functions across a company onto a single computer system that can serve all those different departments’ particular needs. It facilitates communication and enables information to be shared more easily. In the business sense for example, if an order is made, it can be done with all the information about the product or service being ordered available and by eliminating the need to go into different departments, it saves time.

Benchmarking involves setting a baseline against what a company should have done or being doing to remain competitive. This follows certain criteria such as portability, flexibility, geographical application, facility of integration and facility of implementation.

Portability

PeopleSoft run a client server architecture supporting Windows, cell phone technology (WAP), Unix, Linux and Macintosh.

Flexibility

They are able to cater for industries, the federal government, Healthcare, manufacturing, Higher Education, Retail and Utilities. This shows an ability to tailor packages for almost any given enterprise.

Geographical application

PeopleSoft can implement applications that can handle enterprises on a world wide basis.Facility of integration

They offer an open integration platform to connect your enterprise to almost any form of enterprise which links to their application on worldwide basis.

Facility of Implementation Their software can be easily implemented and installed if desired.

PeopleSoft offers a complete packaged software solution for medium sized companies. Since 1987, they have built global enterprise application solutions that meet the changing business demands of organizations worldwide.

Portablity The company whose ERP systems are being benchmarked is called SAP.

Linux, WAP (Mobile phone communications) and Unix.

Flexibility Offers custom made solutions and off the shelf industry solutions.

Geographical application Supports global e-commerce, allowing the organisation to trade world wide with their systems. Facility of integration All major departments can be integrated into a large software solution.

Facility of implementation Support provided after the software package has been purchased by a company.

Activity 4: Profiling a Strategic team: Executive EQ test

Activity 5: Himac Magazine Case

The company mission statement appears to be the best British garden magazine. They aspire to become the leading focus of expertise in garden designing, house decoration and culinary worldwide. For example, the service of providing gardening lessons through the Internet could be offered, and eventually they would expand into other educational areas.

Strategies

They seek to explore other medium attaining international coverage. A means of doing this could be by using SPY IN THE SKY services enabling HiMAC to take aerial photos of any garden and sell specialised tours. This would serve as a means to provide course over the Internet.

Company goals

This involved aligning financial activities and reports for all titles.

BUSINESS CHANGE

In terms of business change, they proposed to have a team solely devoted to dealing with customer queries. They recognised the need for the customer base to expand in order to deal with a greater diversity of customers. They noted some supplier that could help the primary set up of computer based courses as a support if HiMAC took up more educational courses for other organisations. There was a recognition for the need of some departments to receive training for these new technologies. The accounting functions needed to be integrated into one single report.

Good practices

The decision to copy the model of an Internet based course from SurferTeaching Company was both good and bad. It was good in the sense that by copying, it reduced labour content with less work being involved than if one was innovative. It also provided less work by speeding up processes.

Bad practices

It was bad in the sense that by copying another practice, it might not have been tailored for HiMAC as a specific company and thus caused problems like internal division. By not being specifically tailored for their company, its design would not cater for their CSF, goals and objectives. Secondly, the practice may carry inherent imperfections which HiMAC might not recognise and breed into their companies thus bringing new issues to consider.

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