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Student assignments

I list below a number of student assignments that you can consider for seminars or home-work. They are organized chapter by chapter, and range from relatively simple to more demanding. Some require thoughtful reflection; others require original research.

Chapter 1: Introduction to CRM

1. What are the key differences between strategic, operational, analytical and collaborative CRM?

2. Develop your own definition of CRM. Make sure that the definition is neither too broad nor too narrow, and encompasses all four forms of CRM - strategic, operational, analytical and collaborative.

3. Go online and research the differences between CRM as practised by a retail bank, and CRM as practised by an industrial goods manufacturer.

4. How might CRM be used in a not-for-profit setting such as local government or charitable fund-raising?

Chapter 2: Understanding relationships

1. What is a relationship and how do you know if you are in one?

2. Consider your own experience as a consumer of goods and services. Do you want to have a relationship with any suppliers of these goods and services, and, if so, why?

3. In your personal experiences, what counts as a good relationship? Are the characteristics of that good relationship found in customer-supplier relationships.

4. Explain why companies want to develop long-term relationships with customers.

Chapter 3: Planning and implementing CRM projects

1. Why is it important to have a CRM vision before embarking on a CRM project?

2. Go online and visit the websites of several hosted CRM solutions. Critically appraise their claims about hosted solutions being more cost effective than on-premise solutions. You’ll find it helpful to search for independent assessments of these two forms of implementation.

3. How might a balanced scorecard approach be deployed to measure the business outcomes of a CRM project?

4. Investigate the role of people and organizational culture in the success or failure of CRM projects.

Chapter 4: Developing, managing and using customer-related databases

1. In an organization of your choice, conduct an audit of customer-related information. Be sure to consider both front-office and back-office databases. Identify what information is available, where it is located, and comment on its quality.

2. Desirable data attributes are represented in the mnemonic STARTS. What do each of these letters mean?

3. Interview a sales manager or marketing manager. Identify the customer-related reports that they receive. Find out why they want the information, how they use the information, how satisfied they are with the information, and what additional reports they would value.

4. A number of privacy principles have been developed. They focus on purpose specification, data collection processes, limited application, data quality, use limitation, openness, access, data security and accountability. Interview the data controller in an organization of your choice and evaluate how completely these principles are observed in that organization.

Chapter 5: Customer portfolio management

1. Investigate the latest trends in market segmentation for either consumer or business markets.

2. What is activity-based costing and why is it important for customer portfolio management?

3. Use the Fiocca model of customer portfolio analysis to cluster customers of a business-to-business organization to which you have access. What implications does this clustering have for the organization’s customer management strategies?

4. Conduct an interview with sales and/or marketing managers in a business-to-business organization with a view to identifying that organization’s or those individuals’ understanding of what counts as a strategically significant customer? How does that construal differ from the classification presented in the book?

Chapter 6: CRM and customer experience

1. Assemble a group of class-mates and identify a product or service category that you all have in common (e.g. air travel, fast service restaurant). Identify the key components of customer experience for that category, and discriminate between suppliers that deliver good and poor experience.

2. In an organization of your choice, identify the touch points that contribute to customer experience. Investigate whether the organization can prioritize those touch points for their impact on customer experience, and assess the degree to which the customer experience is planned.

3. Go online and research organizations that conduct mystery shopping and/or ethnographic research. What success stories or case studies do they report on their websites?

4. Conduct an audit of the experiential strategies of a company to which you have access. Consider communications, visual identity, product presence, co-branding, spatial environments, websites and electronic media, and people.

Chapter 7: Creating value for customers

1. Using the 7P’s formula, deconstruct the value proposition of an organization with which you are familiar.

2. Read Michael Treacey and Fred Wiersema’s book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, and then assess the degree to which an organization with which you are familiar aligns with the three disciplines.

3. Assess the significance and status of service quality in an industry of your choice. Identify what is meant by ‘high quality service’ in that context and evaluate the service delivery of two major players.

4. What do you understand by the term ‘value’ and to what extent is it possible to segments consumer or business markets by value requirements?

Chapter 8: Managing the customer life cycle: customer acquisition

1. Evaluate the customer acquisition strategies and tactics of an organization with which you are familiar. What is done well and what could be done better?

2. Read Jan Hofmeyr’s book, Commitment-led Marketing. Discuss the degree to which this type of analysis is, or could be, applied in business (not consumer) markets.

3. Go online and research the role of the web in customer acquisition. How effective is it? For which industries does it appear to have most value?

4. Go online and research consumer sales promotions agencies. What success stories or case studies do they report on their websites? How do they prove the success of their promotions?

Chapter 9: Managing the customer life cycle: customer retention and development

1. In the context of an organization with which you are familiar, come up with a definition of ‘customer retention’? What customer-related data does the organization have that indicates success or failure at retention?

2. Go online and research loyalty programs. How successful are they at generating loyalty? What are the distinctive attributes of the most successful programs?

3. Go online and research customer clubs. How successful are they at generating loyalty? What are the distinctive attributes of the most successful clubs?

4. Conduct an audit of a company with which you are familiar. Investigate the organization’s skills, strategies and performance in relation to customer retention.

Chapter 10: Managing networks for CRM performance

1. Construct a supplier network and distribution network diagram for a company with which you are familiar.

2. Consider the issue of network competence. Debate the knowledge, skills and attitudes that are associated with excellence at management of networks and management in networks.

3. Conduct a SCOPE analysis of an organization with which you are familiar. Identify the main members of the SCOPE network and assess how well the organization manages those relationships.

4. Discuss the question ‘Can networks be managed?’

Chapter 11: Managing supplier and partner relationships

1. Go online and research portal technologies. Identify the major players in portal development. What attributes of portals distinguish the more successful from the less successful?

2. Go online and research vendor reduction programs. Which companies are presently reducing the number of vendors with whom they transact, and what benefits are they experiencing or do they expect to experience?

3. Compare and contrast the role e-commerce in business-to-consumer and business-to-business contexts.

4. Conduct an audit of the partner relationships of an organization to which you have access. Consider both partners in value creation and partners in value delivery. How well managed are those partnerships?

Chapter 12: Managing investor and employee relationships

1. Go online and conduct a literature review of recent research (published since 2005) into the service profit chain.

2. Debate the proposition that CRM creates customer value.

3. Discuss this question. Isn’t internal marketing simply human resource management in disguise?

4. What is the role of employee empowerment in the creation and delivery of value to customers? To what extent does empowerment enhance or diminish business performance?

Chapter 13: Information technology for CRM

1. Go online and visit the websites of two enterprise CRM vendors. Compare and contrast their offerings.

2. Go online and visit the websites of two mid-market CRM vendors. Compare and contrast their offerings.

3. What do you understand by the term ‘knowledge management’ , and what role does technology play in it?

4. In the context of an organization with which you are familiar, identify the channels that are used to interact (communicate) with customers and assess the degree to which the use of those channels is integrated. You’ll find it helpful to investigate what is meant by channel integration first.

Chapter 14: Sales force automation

1. Go online and visit the websites of two companies that provide SFA solutions. Compare and contrast their offers.

2. If sales reps decide not to use SFA solutions the potential benefits of SFA may be seriously undermined. Explore the problem of technology acceptance by sales reps, and identify how management can encourage reps to use the technology they are offered.

3. In the context of an organization to which you have access, conduct an audit of the technology solutions - both hardware and software – that are used by sales reps or account managers, or similar. Identify the functionality that is available, the functionality that is most valued and the functionality that they wish they had.

4. Salespeople are found in a wide variety of contexts – in the field calling on business and institutional customers, in offices, contact centres and call centres, in retailing, in the street and even in the home. Considering both hardware and software explore how the technology requirements in these settings differ.

Chapter 15: Marketing automation

1. Go online and visit the websites of companies providing marketing automation solutions. Critically appraise any evidence that they present suggesting that MA solutions have beneficial impacts on marketing performance.

2. What do you understand by closed-loop marketing, and how might this be better applied in an organization with which you are familiar.

3. Campaign management applications are the most widely used MA tool. Go online and compare and contrast the offerings of the campaign management solutions of three different companies.

4. Marketing optimization is the most sophisticated form of MA, but adoption of the technology has been very slow. Why do you believe this to be the case?

Chapter 16: Service automation

1. Go online and visit the websites of companies providing service automation solutions. Critically appraise any evidence that they present suggesting that SA solutions have beneficial impacts on service outcomes.

2. Consider the customer’s perspective on service automation. What evidence can you find that customers benefit when companies implement service automation solutions?

3. Email is massively popular, yet many companies deny customers the opportunity to interact with them in freeform email. Instead, they prefer to use web-forms which are predesigned. Explore the relative advantages and disadvantages of both forms (email and web-form) from the perspective of both customer and organization.

4. Go online and explore the case management (incident management) solutions offered by two vendors. Compare and contrast their offerings.

Chapter 17: Organizational issues and CRM

1. In an organization to which you have access, identify all the front-office and back-office roles that interact with or communicate with customers. Identify the CRM solutions that they employ, if any.

2. Key account management is becoming more important as buying power becomes more concentrated in fewer hands. Investigate the technologies that are deployed by key account managers to ensure that they meet the expectations both of their employers and their customers.

3. Go to the recruitment pages of relevant newspapers and magazines, and visit the websites of online recruitment agents. Obtain the job descriptions for any positions entitled ‘customer relationship manager’. Conduct a content analysis of those job descriptions. What do you conclude to be the major job components of the position?

4. Discuss the major advantages and disadvantages from a CRM perspective of the following types of organization structure - functional, geographic , product (brand or category), market (customer) and matrix.

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