Name: ______

CAT 303 – Customer Relations Management

Final Exam – Each Question is worth 10 pts. – 210 points total

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. 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?
  3. 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?

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?

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.

Managing investor and employee relationships

  1. Debate the proposition that CRM creates customer value.
  2. Discuss this question. Isn’t internal marketing simply human resource management in disguise?
  3. 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?

Information technology for CRM

  1. Go online and visit the websites of two mid-market CRM vendors. Compare and contrast their offerings.
  2. What do you understand by the term ‘knowledge management’, and what role does technology play in it?
  3. 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.

Service automation

  1. Consider the customer’s perspective on service automation. What evidence can you find that customers benefit when companies implement service automation solutions?
  2. 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.
  3. Go online and explore the case management (incident management) solutions offered by two vendors. Compare and contrast their offerings.

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. 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?
  3. 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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