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Case Study Questions Discuss the technical benefits of…
Case Study Questions
Discuss the technical benefits of incorporating CRM into an organization (in general). Provide examples from the provided organizational case studies.
Discuss the importance of CRM for any one of the companies. Why should the company opt for a CRM solution?
What potential challenges might the company encounter/have encountered in implementing CRM (discuss at least 3 in detail)?
How can the company mitigate these potential challenges (from question 2)?
CASE STUDY READINGS (REFERENCES FOR ABOVE QUESTIONS)
Introduction
Salesforce Research found that trusting a company is important to customers, and a trusting relationship results in more than just customer satisfaction. Customers who trust a company are more likely to:
95% BE LOYAL
93% RECOMMEND (THAT COMPANY)
92% BUY MORE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
91% BUY MORE FREQUENTLY
88% SPEND MORE MONEY
86% SHARE MY EXPERIENCES
CRM refers to both:
A type of software (such as Salesforce) that helps businesses manage leads, deals, and clients, and craft targeted marketing campaigns.
The specific strategies via which a business engages and retains its existing customers.
With CRM, the Tescos and Amazons of this world were not only able to win new customers, clients, and users – they got lifetime value out of them. With targeted marketing campaigns, these brands hit the right people with the right offers, at exactly the right time.
So, what kind of lessons can you take from the best in the business? Is CRM the key with which you can unlock your own company’s potential, and fuel commercial growth on a scale that rivals the big guns? Let’s take a look at our top 11 CRM case studies from the world’s leading brands.
Successful CRM Implementation Examples
Bespoke Collection
The four brands that make up Bespoke Collection speak to its commitment to fine wines, elegant art experiences, and unique customer experiences. Bespoke provides the top-tier customer experience it’s known for by building deeply involved relationships via its loyalty programs and memberships. The team behind Bespoke also works hard to understand the company’s customers and which behaviors are associated with buying habits.
As Bespoke’s customer base grew, managing customer data became a real challenge. By embracing CRM solutions, company leaders were able to offer their customers the kind of personal attention that had defined their organization from the beginning. In the words of company President and Partner Paul Leary:
“When someone makes a purchase with us, the next morning at 10 o’clock, they automatically get a personalized email … By placing emphasis on relationship-based sales instead of transaction-based, we’re able to increase customer retention and satisfaction, referrals, and order value.”
Bespoke identified the right CRM tools it needed to make this kind of direct customer connection happen.
You can read in more detail about how Bespoke Collection used its CRM system to improve client relationships.
Wells Fargo
Here we have a company tasked with keeping track of the property and assets of as many as 70 million people. To them, customer service has to be absolutely spot on. As one of the biggest banks in the US, Wells Fargo knows that in order to maintain their competitive edge, they need to go the extra mile when looking after clients. In order to do this well, they make good use of CRM social media connectivity, enabling them to communicate easily with clients that need to talk. Their CRM is also used to make certain that when problems arise, the issue is dealt with by the correct department within the organization. This eradicates the type of scenarios where clients are sent in circles, from department to department, endlessly trying to get an answer. The result is that they build fantastic relationships with clients, achieving a customer retention rate that is one of the best.
Activision
A leading publisher in the US, Activision are heavily into the American video game market and has been so for more than three decades. Back in 2011, ‘Modern Warfare 3’ achieved the title of being the ‘largest and most successful entertainment launch in history’. Unbelievably, it made $400 million in just 24 hours! But Activision knew that money alone could not be their only measure of success. They are very big on customer service, providing an unrivaled communication service to their gamers. Their aim is to keep them happy long after the purchase is made. By using a CRM system, they monitor conversations within social media where they appertain to their products, following up to ensure that any problems are dealt with efficiently and positively. Because social media customer service is so affordable when compared to other methods, the company was able to reduce its customer service operating costs by 25%.
Amazon
We could spend all day throwing statistics demonstrating Amazon’s popularity around, but let’s face it – we’re all familiar with Amazon. As the world’s leading online retailer, Amazon continues to go from strength to strength, led by its enigmatic founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. But how have Bezos and the gang been so good at winning, retaining, and consolidating users of their wildly popular online platform?
By using CRM, that’s how. And if you’ve ever used Amazon (and the data says you probably have), you’ll know how hard its tailored offers, recommendations, and promotions – all based on your past purchases – can be to resist.
Plus, by asking its customers to register for an account, Amazon makes it extremely easy for customers to re-order. Cash-rich, time-poor consumers can pay with a click, and have their goods gracing their doorstep within 24 hours.
Xtreme Lashes
The mission is simple: Xtreme Lashes is dedicated to “enriching and empowering lives by delivering on our promise to provide revolutionary beauty products, unparalleled client support, and comprehensive education.” The company started with a simple yet popular product, but quickly expanded to training programs, and has now become a major player in the beauty industry.
With growth can come growing pains, and the COO, Ali Moshfeghian, says, “We needed a single cloud-based platform that could store all our data, run apps for every department, and deliver value to our clients.” In searching for CRM system examples, company leaders found a powerful solution that not only helped them manage sales and customer service, but also gave Xtreme Lashes the ability to use native apps and add-ons that only increase their productivity.
The company’s investment in a CRM platform, says Moshfeghian, “enabled us to easily create ways to help our stylists and their customers.”
Failed CRM Implementation Examples
But it doesn’t always go well. At times, some of the biggest businesses get it wrong when it comes to CRM, as can be seen from other CRM case studies.
Here we have a story of a fairly large consulting firm that needed some process design work carried out on their new CRM implementation. However, when they asked for help, the installation was already ongoing and the system was already being built. So why were they asking for help at this stage?
This particular CRM case study takes place a couple of years in the past. The company had made a decision to put in place the “best of breed” CRM system to automate its sales force. They also pulled in one of the world’s largest CRM consulting firms to customize the software.
But things began to go wrong. The consulting firm quoted a figure of $20 million for them to design and customize the new CRM tool. The CIO felt that this was much too high and threw the price back at them, resulting in the consultants not only reducing the price but lowering the scope of work as well; they would make the same margin but do less work. The price was cut to $12 million by removing all of the business consulting related to the technology. This included the process definition, business logic, and workflow etc. Basically, this was everything that the CRM was supposed to automate.
But the CIO made a massive error, believing that all of these processes already existed or could be developed in-house. The fact was, they did not and the company had nothing to start with. Realizing their mistake, the company began to recruit hordes of additional consultants to take care of the creation and automation of the sales and marketing systems. The systems integrator was asking them to automate content that didn’t exist. Now the budget began to rapidly expand, quickly surpassing the original figure of $20 million.
Added to this, the brief had originally been limited to dealing with the automation of order entry and other basic sales tasks but it didn’t stay this way. Now it has become an ever-growing wish list of must-have CRM features. It was decided that while they were at it, they could automate the pricing process, add a product configuration tool and integrate with the ERP.
The scope of the CRM functionality and the requirement of the business to quantity the underlying processes soon spiraled way out of control. In the end, the company spent $90 million on the CRM tool, paying the vendor $15 million and consultants $75 million!
But worse was to come. No-one in the company ever got to use the CRM as it was never successfully deployed. Years later as the economy slowed down, the company gave up on the system and finally went out of business.
What do these CRM case studies mean for CRM?
As can be seen from these case studies, CRM can either be used incredibly well or exceptionally badly.
This may be since instead of seeing a CRM as what it is; an incredibly efficient piece of software that can dramatically increase a company’s ROI, they see it as a magic cure-all that will solve all that is wrong with the business. But a CRM only enables systems to work better. By itself, it cannot resolve things that are going wrong, but it will help a company to do things better and faster. Before any type of CRM system is put in place, businesses of all sizes need to decide how they want the business processes to work before they’re automated, and to be sure that these processes actually exist. Don’t make the mistake that the CIO made in the CRM case study above.
Spending a whole load of money on the most expensive system out there isn’t going to necessarily work unless you do your groundwork. A good idea is to begin with the basics and then add to what you have once it is working well. The most crucial part of using a CRM system is the work you do before it is deployed i.e. putting together a CRM selection team and then creating a detailed CRM requirements document, based upon precisely what your business needs. This should include the organizational and automation of everything related to customer interaction, such as marketing, sales, customer service and customer support. The right CRM for your business will analyze all customer interactions and provide you with a way of improving and building upon the customer relationship.
The CRM requirements stage is so important that it can be responsible for the success or failure of your CRM success. Getting it wrong not only costs time and money but can result in the system never actually being deployed. This can be the death-toll for many businesses, even the largest.
Conclusion
With that in mind, then, ensuring you have at least some kind of CRM strategy is crucial. How will you draw in new leads, juggle unfolding deals, and manage prospects and client relationships? How will you keep your customers engaged, ensuring they continue to use your services while identifying with your brand and values?
If these big brand CRM case studies have shown us anything, it’s that CRM software is just as important as the strategic side – all of the big companies are using it to manage customer data and extract key insights which can help improve customer experience.
