UEH UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
FACULTY OF INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS - MARKETING

MIDTERM EXAM

STUDENT NAME: NGUYỄN THỊ KIỀU TRANG

STUDENT ID: 31211021219

CLASS NO: MRC01

Q1: Organizations can overcome the barriers to effective CRM implementation through
communication. What should be communicated and to whom?

1. Clarify the vision and alignment of CRM to all stakeholders, including employees,
customers, and partners
A clear and consistent shared vision of an organization's CRM system plays a key role to build and
maintain the relationship between enterprise and their customers. Without vision, the BOD can not
comprehend about the mission and vision, the long term objective of business including the overall
business goals and customer needs, then they cant make the most effective, and proper decisions. In
that correlation, the stakeholders who do not comprehend the vision are likely to conflict with each
other, which directly affects the long term operation of the enterprise. Besides, the staff may not
deeply understand the orientation, they don’t have the sense of belonging and then they couldn't bring
the better service to final customers.

2. Foster a culture of change readiness and innovation:

CRM innovation and creativity is one of the common obstacles. The inner customers including staff
and BOD, etc tend to resist change as they are used to the old process or fear of the unknown. By
communicating, rewarding and recognizing their contributions, then training them about the change
readiness culture, corporations can create an innovative, active workspace environment.

3. Be transparent about process and timeline to the Stakeholder:

Let the stakeholder, especially staff, BOD and shareholder, acknowledge about the steps involved, the
potential disruption, expected timeframe, and development prospects is the good way to build trust
from them. When they understand the company’s process and orientation, they tend to be more
engaged and committed.

4. Heed the staff about undertake precisely the regulations and standards when processing
data:
Data is the lifeblood of CRM, as it provides insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs.
Hence, if it is inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or inconsistent, it can compromise the effectiveness
and efficiency of CRM activities. Therefore, the company should notify their staff to execute close to
the data quality and integration standards, specially collected, stored, cleaned, validated, and updated
regularly in order to ensure the data output and the subsequent decision making process.

5. Inform to final customers about the data migration and security:

Nowadays, one of the biggest concerns of customers is the risk of their personal data leakage. This
fear makes them be more cautious of providing their data, even they give misinformation. In this case,
the company should inform their final customers that their personal data is used only for the purpose
of deeply understanding customer behaviors, improving the user experience and innovating the
company system. In parallel, the company would also inform that the customer data will be secured
and guaranteed, this would diminish the privacy concerns.

Q2: What are the unique requirements of CDI?

1. Definition

Customer data integration (CDI) is the process of defining, consolidating and managing customer
information across an organization's business units and systems to achieve a "single version of the
truth" for customer data. This golden record is generated by integrating information from all available
source systems, including contact details, customer valuation data and information gathered through
interactions such as direct marketing.

2. Types of data integration

Four data integration techniques used in CDI strategies include:

- Data consolidation: Data is copied from multiple sources and integrated into a single data
store.
- Data propagation: Applications copy and push data from one location to another.
- Data federation: Data federation software enables an organization to aggregate data from
multiple source systems into a virtual database for use in business intelligence (BI) and other
analyses.
- Data warehousing: Data warehouses store data collected by various operational systems; the
data is captured for access and analysis, rather than transaction processing.

3. The unique requirements of CDI

3.1. Master Data Management:

Single source of truth: CDI needs to establish a single, unified view of customer data across
all disparate systems and sources. This eliminates data silos and inconsistencies, ensuring
everyone works with the same accurate information.

3.2. Data Quality and Governance:

- Data cleansing and standardization: CDI must address issues like duplicate records, missing
values, and formatting inconsistencies. Standardized data formats ensure seamless integration
and analysis.
- Data privacy and security: Customer data is sensitive, so robust security measures and
adherence to privacy regulations are paramount.

3.3. Real-time Integration:

Continuous data capture and synchronization: Customer data is constantly changing, so CDI
needs to capture and synchronize updates across systems in real-time. This enables immediate
action based on the latest customer insights.

3.4. Flexibility and Scalability:

- Adaptability to diverse data sources: CDI should handle data from various formats, structures,
and systems, including traditional databases, social media platforms, and IoT devices.
- Scalability to accommodate growth: As customer data volume and complexity increase, the
CDI solution should scale effortlessly to maintain efficient integration.

3.5. User-friendliness and Self-service:

 Intuitive interface for data access and manipulation: Business users, not just IT specialists,
should be able to access and utilize customer data easily through user-friendly interfaces and
self-service tools.

3.6. Business Process Optimization:

Streamlined workflows and improved decision-making: CDI should integrate customer data
into existing business processes, enabling smarter automation, personalized customer
experiences, and data-driven decision making.

Q3: Should a company have (build) a relationship with every customer? Will relationship
marketing bring benefits to every business that applies it? explain why?

First of all, instead of building a relationship with all types of customers, companies should manage
and classify customers according to their potential profitability and loyalty to maximize the profit and
budget the proper investment. Based on the Customer Relationship Group model, there are total fourth
types of customers:

- Strangers: lowest profit potential, low loyalty potential

- Barnacles: low profit potential, high loyalty potential
- Butterflies: High profit potential, low loyalty potential
- True friends: Highest profit potential, high loyalty potential

So, the corporation has to decide which group their customers belong to; therefore determine which
group is primary and secondary segmentation, then build the right relationship with the right
customer. Before that, the company has to construct the proper strategies to approach certain customer
types, including the adequate budget and investment, the customers' touch points, the loyalty program,
etc.

Secondly, relationship marketing definitely brings benefits to businesses in case they apply it
adequately. Relationship Marketing is a strategy of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that
emphasizes customer retention, satisfaction, and lifetime customer value. Here is some benefits that
corporates can gain if they implement relationship marketing properly:

1. Cost-effective

Corporations often find it challenging and costly to acquire new customers. Moreover, managing the
existing potential customers group then maintaining this relationship is also a big deal to the company.
To enterprises which undertake relationship marketing may build a detailed, informative customer
profile, design the proper, cost-effective strategy to retain this relationship over the long term and
increase the customer loyalty and repurchase times.

2. Increase customer retention

By leveraging the database from CRM, companies can connect, communicate and build an attractive
loyalty program for their customers which creates a sense of belonging to special groups. In return,
these customers would be happy to continue interacting, be attracted by the offer and tend to
repurchase over time. In other words, this may increase sales since customers value the
products/services.
 3. Improve your marketing ROI
With higher customer retention numbers, the costs of customer acquisition decrease, providing
companies with a higher budget for building and implementing your relationship marketing strategy.
Moreover, ROI is one of the prime index investors care about; therefore, the high and good ROI
indicator would lead to attracting investors and shareholders to invest more in the company.

4. Increase brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing

One of the biggest effective marketing strategies is word-of-mouth marketing. It stems from the
ongoing customer behavior tendency, they are likely to look for other reviews on different social
platforms, and referrals from their friends and family. So good historical customer experiences are the
most credible and trustworthy reviews that lead to multiple increased brand awareness and new
customers.

However, we have to note that the company is just beneficial from relationship marketing in case they
apply it appropriately. In contrast, it may be consequent in somethings below:
- Resource investment: Building and maintaining relationships requires time, effort, and
resources, which can be costly for large customer bases or businesses with low margins.
- Diminishing returns: Focusing on low-value customers may not yield significant benefits
compared to the effort invested.
- Potential for negative interactions: Not all customers are receptive to relationship-building
efforts, and negative interactions can damage brand perception.
- Shifting customer expectations: Building relationships sets a higher bar for customer service,
and failure to meet expectations can backfire.

Plagiarism Result: