For some, evolution, or change, represents a wonderful opportunity; for many others, it poses a grave challenge to the accepted norm; but for all of us, such change is now an undeniable and omnipresent element of daily life. As developments in technology, travel, media and communication enable us to bring the world closer together, faster, more regularly and more frequently, change ironically becomes the constant, common denominator of life that we need to celebrate more.
This paper intends to examine the analytics and research approach that are being used in customer loyalty. It will evaluate the pros and cons of each method and recommend a new methodology to help business leaders and loyalty marketers to better formulate customer loyalty strategy. The paper will also review the latest development in Customer Loyalty / CRM programs. It will examine the strategic issues that are confronting business leaders / loyalty marketers and most importantly it will identify enhancements in customer research and CRM analytics for building an effective loyalty programs. In addition, business cases will be discussed to showcase how the new analytical approach can be applied in the commercial world and what impacts it could bring in formulating Customer Loyalty strategy.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the few emerging businesses recording significant growth since 2000 despite the recent worldwide economic downturn. CRM covers a wide range of business functions including operation workflow, sales force automation, customer service, marketing, cross selling and up selling. Through each of these business functions, CRM collects, manages and analyzes customer data to achieve customer insights for business organizations to improve their services and increase their profits. The nature of CRM is very similar to Market Research although they are not equivalent. Both areas aimed to transform the collected or available data into meaningful knowledge for business decision making and strategy planning. This paper explains the objectives and development process of CRM programs. It highlights significant issues in implementing a customer-centric CRM model and in particular how market research can assist and improve the implementation of CRM programs.
Possible uses of technical web service standards in customer relationship management (CRM) and market research (MR) are described. A single CRM web portal for a particular type of customer can interoperate with various relevant services in order to increase the service accessibility. MR facilities can be integrated into a CRM web portal to study the customers' behaviours and preferences. Web service standards enhance the interoperability of web-based business services. Formal ontologies as the basis of common semantics of different web services are also necessary but still very immature in CRM and MR industries. Despite various efforts in developing common electronic business standards such as ebXML, both CRM and MR ontologies should be developed to achieve the goals of integrated web-based services.