Case Study Of Customer Relationship Management

Introduction

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Call Centre

Based on Kotler et al (2013), CRM is the key concept of modern marketing. It consists of building up relationship with the customers and gaining their loyalty, by offering superior customers values and satisfaction (Kartik and Rajan, 2012). This is attainable by gathering and managing data and information of individual customers, so as to use the data to deliver and customise superior customer services. One of the ways of gathering customers’ information is through customer feedbacks using call centres. Call centres serves an important purposes, like being channels where customers are able to provide feedbacks and suggestions. Call centres also serves the purpose to clarify

In the case of direct marketing and personalized marketing, call centre is an important way to reach out to the customers. Marketers while using direct marketing to send advertisement to their potential customers should include a toll free number for the customers to call back so the customers can inquire for more information about the products or services. This will ensure the advertisement to achieve a better result and the marketer can trace the efficiency or effectiveness of the advertisement. It also ensure the engagement between the brand and their potential customers, and the message that marketers want to convey can be effectively or correctly passed down. Personalized marketing on the other hand is trying to offer their customers unique product, so call centre could be one of the channel that marketers connect to the potential customers and understand their needs and demands so as to customize a products suitable for the customers. This can also be done through other channels like internet, but internet does not have a stuff to provide assistance and solve any inquires they might have at the moment. Call service correspondent can also inform the customers of their recent promotion or new product launch after customers call in to make complaints

Budhwar et al (2009) has estimate that annually 10million GBP can be saved for every 1,000 jobs outsourced to India. This reflects on the amount of cost that companies can cut down by outsourcing their call centres overseas. This would result in them having a lower production cost and this could be used as the companies competitive advantage. The money saved from the production cost could be used to do more marketing campaigns, more research and development or even to offer the customers cheaper products. Although there is so many benefits to be gained from outsourcing the call centres overseas, but this could in terms compromise the quality of the call centres. The language proficiency of the call correspondent might not be high enough to assist the customers in their problem, customers might also have problems understanding due to the accents that the call correspondent might possess. Another problem might have is that customers that customers that are not able to converse in English will not be able to be served by other languages or dialects. With outsourcing of call centres, marketers might also have problems communicating with the employees of the outsourced companies and a wrongful message might be conveyed to them