UNIVERSITY OF DHAKA

Term Paper on
Implementing the CRM Strategy

Course Title: Customer Relationship Management

Course Coordinator:
ABM Shahidul Islam, PhD
Professor
Department of Marketing Faculty of Business Studies
University of Dhaka

Date of Submission: The 31th March, 2022

Submitted by:
Umme Kulsum Fatema
ID: MPM- 08-19-003
Shamma Showkot
ID: 41943054
Md. Israfil Azad
ID: 41632053
Khan Arif Mahmud Shawn
ID: 41943033
Agenda
Question No. 01:
What is a Touch Point? Identify the different touch points for customers. How
touch points bring the customer experience to life & why is touch point
important?

Question No. 02:

How do the three CRM Applications combinedly help to build a profitable
and sustainable customer relationship?

Question No. 03:

What is CRM’s return on investment? What is the cost to use the CRM system
and the benefits of ROI of CRM?

Question No. 04:

Briefly discuss the various types of CRM implementation projects.
 Answer to the question no. 01
Touch Point
Touch Point is any time of a potential customer or customer come in contact with your brand-
before, during, or after purchase something.
Types of touch points for customers

Website

Mobile Retail Store

Customer Service Social Media

Advertising
Phone Three Prompts

Forms

Common touch points examples

❖ Email campaigns/social media ❖ Check out page
❖ Landing Pages ❖ Support Selection
❖ Product Search and Selection Pages ❖ Blog / New Sletter
❖ In-store

Finding the customer touch point

1. Before Purchase 2. During Purchase

Social media Rating & Reviews Store or office

Testimonials Website
Word of mouth advertisement Stuff team
Marketing and PR Phone System
Point of Sale

3. After Purchase

Billing Online Help Centre

Transactional Emails Follow ups
Marketing Emails Thank you cards
The way of Managing Customer experience
• Deliver the best quality • Rating on basis of performance
• Gathering right information Tolls • Experience with employee
Customer engagement cycle

Awareness
Awareness is defined by how well a consumer recognizes your merchandise or services by
name and how familiar your target market is with your brand.
Consideration
Customers are looking information so that they can research and compare between competitors
and offerings. the ability to migrate any existing contact data into your new CRM so that the
will purchase from you
Purchase
Customers are busy person and want to make the purchase in a way that will be more flexible
and make it simple and straight forward for them to make purchase.
Support
Customer want to purchase from brands that will provide good service and support. Make sure
to support them with any issues, or complaints they have may
Advocacy
Customers who are happy with the experience they encounter with your brand are likely to
recommend you to their peers. Empower them with the ability to easily spread the word on
behalf of your business.
Important of customer engagement
i. Increased revenue, ii. Increased Brand Loyalty
iii. Increased Purchase, iv. Increased Referrals
v. Reduced Churn, vi. Increased Cross-sell
Touch point and mapping

Retain Target

Grow Acquire

Serve On-
board

Answer to the question no. 02

CRM is a multi-dimensional concept and is pursued in different ways by different

organizations. CRM applications is a holistic approach and needs a proper blend of people,
process and technology. The use of CRM applications measured through sales support,
marketing support, service support, analysis supports were found to be positively linked to
customer satisfaction and customer retention (Jayachandran et al., 2005)

Below I’m describing how the three CRM applications combined help to build a profitable as
well as sustainable customer relationship.

a. Sales and sales management functions:

The CRM system is a tool that inevitably accompanies the salesman with necessary
assistance and provides him valuable support enabling him to be efficient and organized
as possible. CRM systems provides the most benefit when used by sales teams for
managing sales of products with long sales cycles, long term usage and/or when the
sale itself passes through several stages. With the use of sales force automation, sales
personnel can expeditiously manage their contacts, accounts, pipelines and other related
 activities. Sales force automation in CRM will allow you to seamlessly manage your
relationships with customers. It will also help to engage customer better and improve
customer retention rates.
b. Marketing Functions:
To cater to the basic marketing needs of a business, CRM’s marketing automation
allows marketers to develop, launch and track campaigns and other marketing offers to
customers. Incorporating robust business strategies, efficacious marketing processes
and dynamic automation technologies, marketing functions of CRM help marketers to
run multi-channel campaign management, opportunity management, market
segmentation, web-based encyclopedia and lead generations. CRM’s other marketing
functions include content management, relationship marketing and one to one
marketing. All of these functions and business strategies help to develop and maintain
a sustainable customer relationship.
c. Customer Service Function:
Customer service function of CRM is one of the most vital applications of CRM. These
functions include incident assignment escalation, field personnel tracking, reporting,
problem management, resolution, order management and warranty/ contract
management. This application of CRM is a key to company’s ability to maintain a
proactive-relations with customers and hence retain satisfied loyal customers. This
CRM system also assist in managing help desk and providing customer care. So
carefully listening customers’ needs and providing prompt service enable a company to
create trust among customer base. Without proper care it is almost impossible to build
a long- term relation with customers. Hence, companies should pay proper attention to
each and every customers’ query.

Therefore, these three applications of CRM combinedly work to develop and maintain a
sustainable customer relationship. These functions are interrelated with each other. Sales
management functions assist in and guide sales force, marketing functions determines business
strategy for target audience and customer service functions are ready for any further assistance
for present and potential customers. So, these three applications are jointly involved to grow
business performance and also directly involved in making a sustainable and profitable
customer relationship for a company.
 Answer to the question no. 03

By managing each stage of the sales lifecycle more efficiently, a typical CRM system provides
a high return on investment. You may be able to put together hastily a CRM customer data
store-house using spreadsheets and email. It’s a safe guess that anywhere between 30 % - 40%
of marketers do. But as you grow, you’ll quickly discover the law of diminishing returns and
realize that you need a CRM system.
In 2011, Nucleus Research found that the average ROI of CRM was $5.60—meaning that for
every dollar spent on a CRM solution, on average, companies earned back $5.60.
In 2014, Nucleus Research found that the return rose to $8.71—a 38 percent increase. A fully
integrated CRM can drive even more profitability. Nucleus also found that CRM integration
with other internal applications brought "productivity increases across sales, service, and
operations and a 20 to 30 percent growth in business."
ROI measures the efficiency of an investment. Even though it can be expressed in dollars, it’s
a ratio—a ratio of income earned to the cost to finance the CRM investment. The goal is to
have the ratio be more than 100% to avoid losing money.

How to understand that a CRM investment works accordingly:

ROI for CRM systems is far more than manually dealing with human errors and repetitive work
done through spreadsheets and documents. With organized and systematically planned work
environments, there are thousands of advantages which can reap you much more investment
benefits than doing it without a CRM.
These are ten CRM benefits that consistently deliver great ROI:
1. Data centralization.
2. Segmentation.
3. Lead scoring.
4. Pipeline view.
5. Email marketing.
6. Productivity tracking.
7. Custom reporting.
8. Inventory management.
Whether it is a good investment or not:
By now, you would have made up your mind that CRM is the right way to go, but do you know
which functionalities are you primarily looking for in your CRM system? It is a lot to think
about on how to distinguish between the different types of CRM and pick the one that best
fulfills your needs.
You need to understand your business requirement before trying to check the types of online
CRM software, to have a better knowledge of the software in picture. Along with basic
functionalities you must always check some add-on features that you get from these CRM
vendors like – after sales services for training your employees on how to use CRM software,
security, scalability and many other features which will help you in longer through the rough
tides on CRM implementation and rollout in your organization.
What Is The Cost To Use The CRM System?
The initial cost of the software, routine maintenance, development resources, and the necessary
training for your business team versus the increase in performance and speed speaks for itself.
A CRM solution undoubtedly increases customer satisfaction and sales results across the board.
Based on the size and needs of your business team, the price of a CRM system varies across
the board. More robust CRMs such as Sales force can cost a pretty penny and might have too
many features that your team has no use for.
On-premise CRM software installed directly onto your company’s server can easily cost
several thousand dollars. Consider the gradual cost of maintenance and the steep expense of
installation, which will certainly require the assistance of a third-party company. This may just
be a one-time payment, but it’s also a one-time payment you can avoid entirely by going with
a cloud-based CRM solution.
Cloud-based CRMs (such as Nimble) typically charge per user per month (or sometimes per
year). The prices vary depending on how many features are included with the CRM, and
whether you commit to an annual or monthly plan.
CRM solutions can cost anywhere from $5/user/month to $500/user/month, but the average
amount companies spend of a CRM is $30/user/month. Nimble charges $9 a month when paid
annually for its basic contact plan, and $19 a month when paid annually for its upgraded
business plan.
Some CRMs even offer free basic plans or free full plans for a limited number of users (e.g. up
to 10). The caveat of these free CRMs is that they don’t typically offer many of the features
businesses require out of their Contact Relationship Manager.
If we’re looking to get an even better ROI from our CRM software, then we may want to
consider a multi-purpose CRM solution that addresses other departments as opposed to
focusing on sales and marketing.
Conclusion:
CRM helps organize leads, customer information, account details, and sales opportunities in
one centralized database, making it easier to manage your data. It also helps improve work
productivity, by allowing access to information to various departments across your company.
Although the implementation of a CRM is usually not economic or simple, the companies that
invest in it do so to put the customer at the center of all their efforts. This, without a doubt, is
the most effective and fastest way to increase sales and profits.
 Answer to the question no. 04

The implementation of the CRM strategy is a process of planning and executing a series of
small CRM projects. These projects are all aimed at addressing the elements of the CRM
strategy and they normally fall into three categories:
1. Operational CRM projects: Enable the company to meet the technical and functional
requirements of the CRM strategy. The objective of these projects is to build an infrastructure
that meets the technical and functional requirements of CRM. Examples of these projects
include automation of functions such as a call center or an order-processing system,
developing an online transaction website, changing the process of data collection and data
management, selecting and appropriate hardware and software, upgrading or reconfiguring the
IT infrastructure, setting up a customer database and or a data warehouse. It should be noted
that these kinds of projects do not create value directly, but – if successfully developed and
completed – they build the basis to perform further value-adding CRM projects.
2. Analytical CRM projects: Have the objective to obtain a good understanding of the
customer’s needs, expectations, and behavior. Analytical CRM projects are implemented to
help the company understand its customers by using data analysis tools that mine the
company’s databases. This area of CRM is also called data analytics. Data analytics can be
understood as the process of leveraging data and technology to increase the company’s
understanding of its customers, products, and environment and to improve strategic decision-
making and tactical market activity. Analytical projects benefit from investments during
previous operational projects by leveraging the infrastructure that the latter has created and
adding value by enabling the firm to understand its customers. These projects create the ability
for a firm to establish and manage profitable relationships with its customers. Moreover, the
results of these analyses provide critical information to continuously refine the CRM strategy.
Analytical CRM projects include three major types of activities:
• Capturing customer information: An effective customer data analysis should rely on a
customer database that is as comprehensive as possible. Building such a customer
database requires capturing all relevant customer information, and this can be a
significant challenge for many companies.
There are a few steps that should be taken to construct a complete database. First, all
customer information from any varying formats or data sources needs to be
standardized from both the business and technical points of view. This is extremely
important for analytical purposes. Second, over time, customers can interact with the
company in a number of new ways, and this will generate a new range of data sources.
Therefore, the analytical solution should also be able to flexibly and consistently
integrate all data across all channels and all customer-company touchpoints. This will
ensure that no important information is missing and ideally, the customer information
is updated in real-time. Third, external sources of information should also be
incorporated to keep the company aware of the competitive situation. External sources
can include:5 Competitors’ data dealing with the company’s customers.5 Published
survey results to supplement the customer information with details about customer
satisfaction and customer preferences.5 Data from communities or clubs with a
common interest. Finally, customer-related back-office data related to billing and
shipment should be evaluated from a financial perspective and should be consolidated
 into a coherent picture of financial success and customer profitability. Successful data
intelligence solutions integrate customer data and ensure that useful analytical results
are delivered.
• Customer data transformation: This type of data analytics activity involves extracting
and transforming raw data from a wide source of internal and external databases, marts,
or warehouses, and then pooling the total data value and information in one place where
it can be accessed and explored. First, in order to perform customer data transformation,
the company needs to build a data warehouse. Data warehousing involves consolidating
all relevant customer data within a comprehensive database and making it accessible to
the users in the organization who need it. Many firms have made progress on that end.
However, there are still legacy systems that prevent accessing and analyzing the data
from often is not as easy, fast, or accessible as it should be. Unless the data is available
in a useful format, in a timely fashion, and enables the analysis that marketers rely on,
the data are of no value at all.
Second, a firm must enhance the data about a customer by integrating information from
various internal sources. If the integrated customer data is incomplete, the company
should enhance the data with externally available information. For example,
geographic, lifestyle, and psychographic data can help in developing a complete image
of a customer. All this information can be pulled together into a single source, and a
historical perspective can be developed over time.
• Customer knowledge discovery: This type of data analytics project provides marketers
with the tools and processes to discover customer data, convert information into usable
customer knowledge, and deploy it to enhance marketing decision-making. This usually
involves a three-step process: (a) Analyzing the data: Using statistical tools to better
understand customers. (b) Predicting the future: Based on analytical results obtained
from existing data. (c) Assessing customer value

3. Application projects: Focus on deploying the operational and analytical outputs to improve
marketing decisions and customer relationships. Although an operational CRM project can put
the CRM architecture into place, and an analytical CRM project can extract helpful information
on customers’ needs and expectations, no value will be created until this system and the
information is applied and utilized to improve the company’s marketing decision making and
the company’s relationships with its customers.
In general, the goal of these projects is to increase revenue and profit by improving
relationships with customers. For example, automation of a call center will serve customers
more promptly and effectively, and online transaction processes will enable customers to
transact through self-service. Using the analytical results of customer value assessment and
customer profiling helps design marketing campaigns that target the customers or prospects
that are most likely to respond and that provide a high expected value. Also, customer calls can
be directed to the appropriate contact person in a call center depending on customer rating and
customer value to ensure that the most valuable customers receive the best service possible.
Products or services can be customized, or even personalized, based on customer behavior
modeling and customer segmentation to meet their unique expectations. The planning and
forecasting of sales, marketing, and customer service can be improved based on customer life-
cycle patterns (engage, transaction, fulfill, and service) to make the sales and marketing efforts
more focused and efficient. All these measures will help the company acquire and retain the
most attractive customers and improve the profitability of the existing customer base. Finally,
insights from the analysis can be used to dissolve relationships with the low-value customer.