11 terrible CRM SYSTEMS
Microsoft Dynamics
CRM is available in both on-premise (approximately $1,100 per named user
and approximately $5,000 for the server software) or via the cloud at
$44/month/user. Dynamics CRM has grown significantly over the past few
years, mainly because of its ease of use and seamless integration with
all-things-Microsoft, from Outlook and Office to Sharepoint and its other
business applications like Dynamics GP. Dynamics is extremely
customizable, scalable to larger, enterprise-size workgroups and serviced
through Microsoft’s partner channel.
Salesforce.com is
arguably the most well known of these applications. And deservedly
so. The company pretty much invented cloud-based CRM and remains
committed to its future. Like the products listed below,
Salesforce.com CRM -0.35% offers sales,
marketing and service management capabilities to its small and (very) large customers.
The application is only available through the cloud and can range in price from
$60 to $125 per month per user for the typical corporate version (although
pricing can be less for very basic features or more depending on the added
modules purchased).
Overview of CRM Systems
Implementing CRM System – Roadmap
BTAR Case
A North American based retailer that does business primarily in the United States, but also with some stores in
Canada sends out weekly promotional marketing material to customers, and
potential customers. Recent legislation
has passed in Canada called “Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation” or better known as
CASL. The premise of this law is to
prevent Canadian citizens from receiving unsolicited marketing communications
over different types of mediums like email, texting, social media, or instant
messaging. The law still allows this
type of communication but only when permission is obtained from the individual.
It is still unclear what types of
communication fall under CASL, therefore workers need to determine what types
of communication apply to CASL for example bill pay notification, or a weekly sales
flyer. Currently when a customer opt’s into receiving
electronic communication their name is added to a database, with CASL
regulations it is needed to be determined what determines a person’s acceptance
to receive electronic communications.
Our company doesn’t want to lose out on sale opportunities, but we need
to comply with the law. The fines for
violating this law reach as high as $10 million per infringing communication.
QUESTIONS
What does this
North American retailer sell?
Primarily electronics, and appliances, direct competitor to
Best Buy
Are these frequent
small purchases or large durable goods type products?
Both some items like CD’s, cables, hard drives, small
electronic components, but other items like TV, and appliances are longer term.
Are these strictly
online purchases or do we have “bricks&mortar” shops?
Both
What percentage of
our customers are repeat customers and what percentage are one time buyers?
70% have made purchase at least one purchase before, 30
percent are new customers.
What portion of
its revenues and profits are derived from Canadian sales? How significant is this market to our sales
and profitability?
Canadian sales make up only 15% of the company’s revenue,
and contributes 10% to the company’s overall profitability.
What is our advertising
conversion ratio? Churn rate? How much
does our email advertising contribute to revenue? What other advertising approaches do we
currently use?
No assessment has been made to determine how much revenue
comes from what media advertising streams.
Given the overall drop in newspaper circulation the company wants to
focus more on electronic advertising.
For example offering text alerts for special sales, special email alerts,
along with regular weekly ad flyer. The
company as well advertises on Social Media through the use of Twitter, and
Facebook.
What is meant by
“weekly promotional materials” (WPM)?
CASL only covers “CEM - Commercial Electronic Message.” So this must be a weekly email or text
message? Do we use social networking
platforms such as Facebook or Youtube as well?
How were the
customer’s email addresses obtained? From a previous purchase? From a product inquiry? From a signup on our website? Product registration cards? Loan applications?
At checkout it is provided to the cashier, sign up for web
or text alerts from the company website.
Do we just
maintain a single “contact List” of email addresses or do we have a customer
database that keeps track of how we obtained those addresses? Do we have multiple databases maintained by
different contactors? (Marketing,
Billing, Warranty, etc).”
Currently today this information is stored in a customer
profile database that contains just customer information. One of the fields that is identified by that
customer is their email address, and a field that indicates can we market to
them or not.
Messages “to a
current customer or someone who has inquired in the last six months” are
exempt. As are messages that “provide
warranty, recall, safety, or security information about a product or service
purchased by the recipient” or “provide information about a purchase,
subscription, membership, account, loan, or other ongoing relationship,
including delivery of product updates or upgrades.” Do message recipients currently belong to
these classes?
This is something to be determined the company has suspended
all electronic communication in Canada until it can be determine what is safe
to electronically communicate.
If the current WPM
is not exempt under one of these classes, it must have implied consent. Implied consent includes when a “recipient
has purchased a product, service or made another business deal, contract, or
membership with your organization in the last 24 months.” Is this the case currently?
Yes if the email address is provided they are currently
marketed to unless they request we stop.
Express consent
can be obtained by an agreement to a simple question such as “Do you want to
receive monthly newsletters and weekly discount notifications from Company
X." Do we preface our WPM with this
question?
This is asked if the customer makes a transaction online,
but verbally asked in the store.
Promotions in the past have been offered giving to the customer giving
them additional money off a purchase if their email address is provided.
Do we provide an
“Unsubscribe” option on current WPM emails?
The law allows for a three year transition period and we may continue to
solicit them unless they unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe option is offered, which then updates that
customer’s profile.
NOTES
Alternative A (Comprehensive CRM)
Treat the disease, not the symptom!
The problem is that we treat our customers as unknown to
us. We do not know who they are and we
do not care, we simply want them to buy our stuff. If that means we shove advertising at them
randomly, then so be it.
CASL is the result of customers and potential customers
growing sick of this shoddy treatment.
They view our marketing offers as unsolicited SPAM, junk mail. They want to be protected from us.
This is not a good way to gain customers and adherents.
CASL addresses a symptom.
We could view our response to CASL as a workaround. Just “establish contact” to qualify a person
as having granted “implied consent” and then we can continue the bombardment.
Why not use this as a wake-up call and solve the actual
problem?
What we need is a whole new way of viewing our
“customers.”
We need to dissolve the boundaries between them and us.
We need to bring them inside.
Let’s build a community where we have conversations and
dialogues about our products and services.
Where all contacts are ongoing.
Where we know who our customers are
We know Their names,
Their interests
Their needs
Their wants
Their complaints
Their suggestions
“What are our Customers Lifetime Value (CLV) scores? -- based on the relationship
between the revenue produced by a specific customer, the
expenses incurred in
acquiring and servicing that customer, and the expected life
of the relationship
between the customer and the company.” (L&L 12)
“Customer churn is reduced as sales, service, and marketing
better respond to
customer needs. The churn
rate measures the number of customers who stop
using or purchasing products or services from a company. It
is an important
indicator of the growth or decline of a firm’s customer
base.” (L&L 12)
We need a comprehensive Customer Relationship Management
platform with an active business intelligence component.
We should be able to personalize and target our offerings so
that they do not appear as cheap SPAM, but are virtually indistinguishable from
a personalized and direct appeal.
Build loyalty club rewards, offer rewards at time of sale, not some time in the future, build online social networking with reviews, complaints, suggestions, help features, build community resources -- blogs and wikis, analyze all touchpoints!
In house or in the cloud?
Alternative B (Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing)
Build a customer data warehouse to eliminate redundancies,
centralize and standardize customer information into “a single version of the
truth”, add information related to implied or explicit consent, such as
touchpoint, date of last contact, etc.
Develop data cleansing and validation reports to insure that no
solicitations are directed at those who have unsubscribed, and that all
recipients of CEM meet implied consent criteria or are within 24 months of last
purchase. Begin using business
intelligence to better understand our customers and begin to classify them
according to criteria like how often do they make purchases, do they submit
registration of their products, do they respond to online or email offerings,
have they provided explicit consent, etc.
Alternative C (Data Problem/Trigger Events and Stored Procs)
Build simple data capture tools to game the system. Tag our contacts with Expiration Dates and
keep tabs on their “implied consent” so as to meet the letter of the CASL
law. This is viewing this as a data
problem, to be solved, not as a symptom of a bigger problem.
Using SQL triggers (pg 289)
A trigger is a stored program that is executed by the DBMS whenever a
specified event occurs.
Triggers for Oracle Database are written in Java or in Oracle’s PL/SQL.
SQL Server triggers are
written in Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) languages, such
as Visual
Basic.NET, or Microsoft’s T-SQL. MySQL triggers are written in MySQL’s
variant of SQL.
A trigger is attached to a table or a view. A table or a view may have
many triggers, but a
trigger is associated with just one table or view. A trigger is invoked
by an SQL DML INSERT,
UPDATE, or DELETE request on the table or view to which it is attached.
Figure 7-24 summarizes
the triggers available for SQL Server 2008 R2, Oracle Database 11g,
and MySQL 5.5.
Oracle Database 11g supports three kinds of triggers: BEFORE,
INSTEAD OF, and AFTER.
As you would expect, BEFORE triggers are executed before the DBMS
processes the insert,
update, or delete request. INSTEAD OF triggers are executed in place
of any DBMS processing
of the insert, update, or delete request. AFTER triggers are
executed after the insert, update, or
delete request has been processed. Altogether, nine trigger types
are possible: BEFORE
(INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), INSTEAD OF (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), and
AFTER
(INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE).
Since SQL Server 2005, SQL Server supports DDL triggers (triggers on
such SQL DDL
statements as CREATE, ALTER and DROP) as well as DML triggers. We
will only deal with the
DML triggers here, which for SQL Server 2008 R2 are INSTEAD OF and
AFTER triggers on
INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. (Microsoft includes the FOR keyword, but
this is a synonym
for AFTER in Microsoft syntax.) Thus, we have six possible trigger
types.
MySQL 5.5 supports only BEFORE and AFTER triggers, thus it supports
only six trigger
types. Other DBMS products support triggers differently. See the
documentation of your
product to determine which trigger types it supports.
When a trigger is invoked, the DBMS makes the data involved in the
requested action
available to the trigger code. For an insert, the DBMS will supply the
values of columns for the
row that is being inserted. For deletions, the DBMS will supply the
values of columns for
the row that is being deleted. For updates, it will supply both the old
and the new values.
Triggers have many uses. In this chapter, we consider the four uses
summarized in
Figure 7-25:
• Providing default
values
• Enforcing data
constraints
• Updating SQL views
• Performing
referential integrity actions
Using Stored Procedures (pg 295)
A stored procedure is a program that is stored within the database and
compiled when used.
In Oracle Database, stored procedures can be written in PL/SQL or in
Java. With SQL Server
2008 R2, stored procedures are written in T-SQL or a .NET CLR language,
such as Visual
Basic.NET, C#.NET, or C++.NET. With MySQL, stored procedures are
written in MySQL’s
variant of SQL.
Stored procedures can receive input parameters and return results.
Unlike triggers,
which are attached to a given table or view, stored procedures are
attached to the database.
They can be executed by any process using the database that has
permission to use the
procedure. Differences between triggers and stored procedures are
summarized in
Figure 7-31.
Triggers vs. Stored procedures (Figure 7-31)
• Trigger
— Module of code
that is called by the DBMS when INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE commands are issued
— Assigned to a
table or view
— Depending on the
DBMS, may have more than one trigger per table or view
— Triggers may
issue INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE commands and thereby may cause the invocation
of other triggers
• Stored Procedure
— Module of code
that is called by a user or database administrator
— Assigned to a
database, but not to a table or a view
— Can issue INSERT,
UPDATE, DELETE, and MERGE commands
— Used for
repetitive administration tasks or as part of an application
Stored procedures are used for many purposes. Although database
administrators use
them to perform common administration tasks, their primary use is
within database applications.
They can be invoked from application programs written in languages such
as COBOL, C,
Java, C#, or C++.
They also can be invoked from Web pages (as we will in Chapter 11)
using, for
example, VBScript, JavaScript or PHP. Ad hoc users can run them from
DBMS management
products such as SQL*Plus or SQL Developer in Oracle Database, SQL
Server Management
Studio in SQL Server, or the MySQL Workbench in MySQL.
The advantages of using stored procedures are listed (in Figure 7-32. )
Advantages of Stored Procedures
• Greater security
• Decreased network
traffic
• SQL can be
optimized
• Code sharing
-
Less work
-
Standardized processing
-
Specialization among developers
Unlike application code, stored procedures are never distributed to
client computers. They always reside in the database and are processed by the
DBMS on the database server. Thus, they are more secure than distributed
application code, and they also reduce network traffic.
Increasingly, stored procedures are the preferred mode of processing
application logic over the Internet or corporate intranets. Another advantage
of stored procedures is that their SQL statements can be optimized by the DBMS
compiler.
When application logic is placed in a stored procedure, many different
application programmers can use that code. This sharing results not only in
less work, but also in standardized processing. Further, the developers best
suited for database work can create the stored procedures while other
developers, say, those who specialize in Web-tier programming, can do other
work. Because of these advantages, it is likely that stored procedures will see
increased use in the future.
Reference
Kroenke and Auer. (2012). Database Processing: Fundamentals, Design,
and Implementation. Pearson. 12th
edition.
