RESEARCH SPECTRUM: VOL.

2, ISSUE II, 2011

CONTENTS
• Ayn Rand’s Women Protagonists
Dr. Anar Salunke 01
• Home
Dr. Annie John 03
• Self Victimization in the Shorter Fictions of Jai Nimbkar
G. Hampamma 04
• Arundhati Roy’s the God of Small Things: An Overview
Dr. Arvind Nawale 09
• Class and Caste conflict in Mulkraj Anand’s Coolie
Dr. N. B. Pawar 12
• Thematic Concerns of Kamala Das as a Poet
Bhange P.B 14
• Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things: A Semantic Study under Various Categories
Pawar Keshav and Waghadare Dhananjay 16
• Feministic Concerns in Jhabvala’s Fiction
Manju Rani 23
• The Theory of Absurdism through Camus’ Plague
Sr.Candy D’cunha 29
• Treatment of the Cooperative Principle in Pinter’s the Birthday Party
Sagar Waghmare 32
• Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): Dilemma between Faith and Unfaith
Dr. N. R. Sawant 37
• The Role of the English Teacher: Team-Teaching in the English Classroom
Dr. G. Sundari 41
• The Great Gatsby: An Ironic Dismantling of the American Dream
Satnam Kaur 46
• The Politics of Betrayal in Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo
K. Narasimha Rao 49
• Reading Select Works of Chitra Divakaruni and Amulya Malladi as Emigrant Writings
A.Padmaja 55
• The Role of Reflection, Teacher Beliefs and Decision Making: an insider’s view at work? in Enhancing
ESL Teacher Professionalism
Nirmala Y 59
• The Impact of Great Depression on American Drama
Dr. V. Sri Rama Murthy 64
• A Glimpse of the Fictional World of Arun Joshi
Dr. S. D. Sindkhedkar 68
• Teaching Basic Vocabulary (BV) in English: Suggestions and Implications
Rajkumar Guduru 72

• The Theme of Love and Sex in the Poetry o Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das

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Dr.khandekar Surendra 77
• Pedagogical Effectiveness of Computer Assisted Language Learning for Engineering Students
H. Ayesha Parveen 81
• Fleeting Moments and Lasting Impressions in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Vijay
Tendulkar’s Ashi Pakhare Yeti
Deepali Patil 85
• Technological trends in Customer Relationship Management
Rajkumar Pachigalla and Asi Vasudeva Reddy 90
• Mythical Krishna and Modern Krishan in Mulk Raj Anand’s Morning Face: A Critical Study of the Old
Myths in the Current Epoch
Gurpreet Singh 95
• Predicament of Women in Munshi Premchand and Mulk Raj Anand’s Works
Dr. M .H. Rudramuni 101
• Cultural Hybridity in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies
Shashikant Mhalunkar 106
• Redefining and Reconstructing Myth and Culture for Socialism in Farrukh Dhondy’s Bombay Duck (1990)
Dr. Deepak Nanaware 112
• Globalization, Spiritualism and Indian Saint Poets
Dr. Mukta Mahajan 114

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Technological trends in Customer Relationship Management
Rajkumar Pachigalla and Asi Vasudeva Reddy, Assistant Professors – K L University
Abstract
Over the past few decades, cross-border business
has experienced unparalleled growth. This growth is
due to advances in communication and information
technologies, privatization and emergence of the
global consumer. As the era of globalization
continues to manifest through the emergence of
global companies, the importance of customer
relationship management (CRM) in these
companies has become increasingly significant.
CRM has changed the way companies handle
customer enquiries advertise and sell their products
or manage the entire relationship with their
customers. As the power of CRM technology has
expanded, companies have come to view it as a
resource ever more critical to their success in
customer management. CRM technology has
delivered great benefits to some firms, in addition to
playing a direct role in cost, CRM technology often
alters the cost drivers of activities in ways that can
improve a company’s value proposition. This paper
looks at the evolution of CRM and CRM technology,
analyses its current status.
Keywords: customer value; Customer Relationship
Management; information technology management.
Introduction
Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) is a strategic and action-oriented view on the
relationship between the customer and a company
[Messner 2005]. CRM provides methodologies,
strategies, processes and technologies to support a
redesign of this relationship. Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) is a hot topic in the marketing
literature these days. According to Reinartz et al.
(2004), organizations are realising that customers
have different economic value for the company. An
intense interest in this concept is also apparent in
marketing practice and is most evident in firms’
significant investment in customer relationship
management systems (Reinartz and Kumar 2000;
Wyner 1999).
Corporate businesses that try to implement
CRM successfully even in a single market face a
tough challenge as evidenced by the following
working definition of CRM: CRM is the strategic
process of selecting the customers, a firm can most
profitably serve and of shaping the interactions
between a company and these customers with the
goal of optimizing the current and future value of the
customers for the company. (Kumar and Reinartz
2006)
Operationally, CRM can thus be described
as the process for achieving a continuing dialogue
with customers, across all available touch points,
through differentially tailored treatment, based on
the expected response from each customer to
available marketing initiatives, such that the
contribution from each customer to overall
profitability of the company is maximized.
CRM has been predominantly influenced
by two entirely different trends from two science
disciplines: a) in the area of marketing the advance
from transaction marketing to relationship marketing
and b) within computing science the development
from information management to customer
knowledge management.
The need for superior customer knowledge
was the driving force for the move from transaction-
based marketing to relationship marketing. Avoiding
customer attrition and promoting retention has
become a key element in the new business model
of the information age. This approach is applied to
complete markets with the help of information
technology
In the past, the introduction of new
information management systems has been driven
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by a dominance of technology. The nature of IT as
an instrument for streamlining processes and
achieving cost reduction was recognized. Especially
for processing mass data, new systems were
introduced handling functional areas like
accounting, sales or the control of production
facilities.
The concepts of database marketing
(DBM) and sales force automation (SFA) (Porter,
Millar 1985) have laid the foundation for marketing
on the basis of knowledge of the needs and
behaviour of the individual customer. These
advanced systems require real time data integration
which initially was achieved using proprietary
application programming interfaces (APIs). From a
technical viewpoint, CRM systems can be
considered as an advancement of the earlier sales
force automation (SFA) systems. SFA systems
primarily support the sales process of companies
whereas CRM systems integrate support for
marketing, sales and service processes
CRM Technology Strategy
Strategy today requires a broader and
more nuanced definition of competitive advantage,
one that encompasses traditional sustainable
advantage but that also includes more transient
leverageable advantages. A leverageable
advantage can be defined as a privileged market
position that, however fleeting, provides a stepping
stone to another privileged position.
Successful companies will have to
establish leverageable advantages with the help of
CRM technology and protect their new distinctive
position by treating it only as a stepping stone to
move on to the next level. A CRM strategy is the
guide to turn customers into assets. It is based on
an understanding of how the company’s
competencies can create value propositions for the
customers and the market segments that offer the
most value potential.
Consequently the CRM strategy can be
depicted as an interweaving of various operational
strategies (sales, service, channel, product and
communication strategies). The company’s position
in the market relative to its competitors and its
objectives are described in the marketing strategy.
The customer strategy defines objectives based on
the customer life cycle to create greater customer
value and loyalty. Interweaving these strategies
helps to understand customers in the context of the
market, the market segments and the market
forces. This then governs other supporting
operational strategies – such as HR and IS/IT. The
process of interweaving strategies stands for
adjusting and fine-tuning already existing marketing
and customer strategies. Depending on the
outcome of the business evaluation, it can also
connote a repositioning of the company. This
process is iterative and evolutionary, highly
interactive and definitively requires upper-
management and board-level involvement.
Subsequently the area strategies can be designed.
As a result of this step, the company’s DNA is
created, dictating what the CRM capabilities should
deliver.
It is possible to tailor elements of a CRM
system to a particular industry and its processes by
using standardized configuration tools. As CRM
systems become more and more advanced,
vendors compete on their ability to propose, provide
and incorporate industry best practices. Any
customization specific to the company’s processes
is usually done by outside consultants, ‘meaning
that any valuable customization could be replicated
by other companies
The current status of CRM technology
The CRM technology is of two varieties
depending upon the specific usage of its functions
by the organizations, viz. Proprietary and
infrastructural technologies. Proprietary
technologies can be owned, actually or effectively,
by a single company. They aid enterprises in their
business strategy for competitive uniqueness,
namely to distinguish themselves from other
companies with a similar mission. Infrastructural
technologies, in contrast, offer far more value when
shared than when used in isolation (Carr N 2004).
Generally they are commodities. But in early phases
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of its development, an infrastructural technology can
take the form of a proprietary technology. As long
as access to the technology is restricted, individual
quick-moving and forward-looking companies often
have opportunities to use it to gain advantages over
rivals and differentiate themselves. These
advantages are based on superior insight into the
use of CRM systems and their transformational
power. But the beneficial effects of new
technologies diffuse throughout the entire business
community through rampant copycat-ism. In the end
of the cycle, infrastructural technologies begin to
fade into the background of business and thus
cease to be a concern of a company’s senior
decision makers.
For every technology or product there exist
a life cycle, for CRM, also exists a life cycle which
has five stages starting from the market introduction
to maturity based on Gartner Group’s hype cycle
diagram and the cycle is discussed as follows;
Technology trigger: A breakthrough
invention, public demonstration at a product launch
generates significant industry interest. This leads to
a phase of over-enthusiasm and sometimes
unrealistic projections on the business benefits of
utilizing the new CRM technology as a
differentiating factor. When it becomes clear that a
Peak of inflated
expectation
V Plateau of
i
s
i Trough of
disillusionment
b
Technology
i Trigger
l
i
t
y
new technology is emerging, companies invest
heavily in the new infrastructure. This often requires
substantial alterations to business processes.
Enterprises feel that they have little choice but to
invest, stay ahead or at least abreast with their
competitors. But the technology is still new, it is
unstable, untested and can thus cause great
damage to a company’s operation. ‘In other words,
companies are forced to install a critical new
business resource before they’ve learned how to
manage it effectively’
Peak of inflated expectation: The new
CRM technology is then pushed to its limits. There
are some well-publicized stories about how
companies have applied it to differentiate
themselves, but even more about project failures. At
this stage it is difficult to draw any broad conclusion
about the effect of CRM systems on the
competitiveness or profitability of individual
businesses. Analytical CRM, as an example of a
technology at the peak, contains all techniques to
analyse and optimize customer relationships. But
now the development is standing rather still
because these peculiarities did not find a big
enough market.
Fig. 1: CRM Adoption Cycle
Productivity
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Trough of disillusionment The inflated
promises cannot be kept by the new technology. It
rapidly becomes unfashionable and out-dated.
Other application areas like selecting a target group
for marketing campaigns have already matured and
are widely used in practice. CRM vendors are now
trying to hide these unfashionable and out-dated
techniques.
Slope of enlightenment: To be strong in the
market there should be innovation coupled with the
acceptance of the new product, for this Ongoing
research and hard work will finally lead to a fine-
tuning of the technology and a true understanding of
its capabilities. Hence methodologies and tools
become available to ease its introduction into
companies. An example of a technology that is only
slowly being fully understood is personalization.
This helps a business to fully align itself to the
customer’s current and specific needs and
preferences. Many applications contain some
simple form of personalization, such as setting user
preferences; but automatically deriving information
needs from just a few historical data points remains
difficult. It works pretty well on customer segments
when applied to marketing campaigns; on an
individual level Amazon has pioneered a simple
scheme.
Plateau of profitability: Methodologies and
tools are becoming more and more fine-tuned and
stable as they enter new generations. The
connection between technology and business
strategy has been established. The final visibility (or
height of the curve in the adoption cycle) ‘varies
according to whether the technology is broadly
applicable or benefits only to niche markets’. A good
example of a mature CRM technology is static
reporting. Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a
technique which is in fact older than the concept of
the relational database and has now left its niche
market and become a widely used commodity.
Overshooting
Overshooting is the process by which the
performance of a technology product comes to
exceed the requirements of most of its users. As a
consequence, products whose features and
functionality closely match market needs today
often follow a trajectory of improvement by which
they overshoot mainstream market needs tomorrow.
Companies tend to achieve the greatest gains in the
earliest stages of a new technology, after which the
practical benefits of further technological advances
decline abruptly. Overshooting is a common
phenomenon with CRM vendors. CRM vendors
compete fiercely to advance the state of the art,
adding, new features and functions to their CRM
products in order to stay on the coveted cutting
edge. But each new version of a CRM system
overshoots the needs of some customers, and
makes the product too complex for them. So these
businesses often respond by starting a system
evaluation, frequently followed by switching to
leaner CRM systems from other suppliers. Some
CRM vendors are slow to accept the reality of
overshooting. They want to believe that the needs
of businesses will march in lockstep forever.
Ultimately CRM systems as software may
just disappear. Salesforce.com and other vendors
like Siebel are offering ‘on-demand’ products where
access to CRM applications is provided over the
Internet for a monthly fee. Companies buy their
information technologies as services provided over
the Internet rather than owning and maintaining all
their own hardware and software. ‘This may herald
the final step in business software’s brisk march
toward commoditization: from in-house programs to
contractor-written applications to packaged
applications to fee-based services’. However, it
remains to be seen how fully the utility model will
actually be received and implemented by
companies. There are enormous technical
challenges, from establishing complex but robust
data standards to setting up huge, reliable and
secure data centres. Many executives remain
sceptical, since they wasted time and money on
Internet initiatives in the late 1990s during the e-
commerce hype.
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Conclusion efficiency or a better-known brand. The time has

The real challenge is to sustain competitive come for a more conservative approach to CRM
advantage through a differentiating use of CRM technology investment. As CRM strategy,
technology long enough to earn a solid return on processes and systems mature, successful
investment and to leverage the technological companies will not be those that pursue every
advantage into more durable advantages – innovation, but rather those that invest carefully and
increased customer base and retention, process perform pragmatic planning.
References
1. Carr, N. (2004) Does IT Matter? Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
2. Harmeen Soch and H.S. Sandhu (2008) “Does Customer Relationship Management Activity Affect
Firm Performance?” Global Business Review 2008, 189-206
3. Kotabe, M. and K. Helsen (2001), Global Marketing Management. New York: John Wiley.
4. Kotler, Philip and Gary Armstrong (2005), Principles of Marketing, 11th ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
5. Messner, W. (2005) ‘Offshoring IT to India as an Enabler for Banking Business Transformation’, in
P. Brudenall (ed.) Technology and Offshore Outsourcing Strategies. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
6. Ramaseshan, B. et al. (2006) “Issues and Perspectives in Global Customer Relationship
Management” Journal of Service Research, Volume 9, No. 2, November 2006 195-207
7. Reinartz, W. and V. Kumar (2003), “The Impact of Customer Relationship Characteristics on
Profitable Lifetime Duration,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (1), 77-99.

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RESEARCH SPECTRUM
A Peer – Reviewed National Journal

Volume- II Issue-2: August, 2011

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Nationality : Indian
Address : 129/498, Vasant Vihar, Nr. Old Pune Naka,
Solapur 413001

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Nationality : Indian
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