CRM Food Industry Strategy Analysis

This sample essay on Crm Food Industry reveals arguments and important aspects of this topic. Read this essay’s introduction, body paragraphs and the conclusion below.

Institute of Management, Nirma University, Ahmedabad SERVICE MARKETING Project Proposal on “Customer Relation Management Practices in the Indian Fast Food Industry” Submitted To: Prof. Ashwini Awasthi Submitted by: Meghna Mavani (091227) 1 Project Title: Customer relation management practices in the Indian Fast-Food Industry. Introduction to the topic: Relationship marketing is emerging as the core marketing activity for businesses operating in fiercely competitive environments.

On average, businesses spend six times more to acquire customers than they do to keep them. Therefore, many firms are now paying more attention to their relationships with existing customers to retain them and increase their share of customer? s purchases. Customer Relationship Management is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. CRM is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing a company? s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects.

It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management describes a company-wide business strategy including customer-interface departments as well as other departments. CRM or customer relationship management is a system of processes which businesses use to rganize and streamline customer service, give sales staff the customer information they need to achieve higher closure rate, optimize marketing and sales efforts, and help to increase the customer base and revenues.

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Rationale of the project: ? Customer Relationship Management is a process or methodology used to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. CRM is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing a company? s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects.

Customer Relationship Management For Restaurants

Hence a detailed 2 understanding of the various trends of CRM being followed currently would be of great importance to the going-to-be-managers. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. ? CRM involves all the functions of an organization. The idea of CRM is that it helps businesses use technology and human resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those customers. Hence a detailed study of such a widespread initiative carried out by several global organizations would create a deep managerial insight. Moreover the entire reason for taking up the Indian Fast-Food Industry as my project topic is that with the rapidly growing middle class population and changing lifestyle, India is blessed with one of the fastest growing fast food markets in the world. The Indian fast food market is growing at an annual rate of 25-30%. Almost all the world? s big fast food brands have succeeded in making their presence felt in the country and most of them are posting appreciable growth. ? Also, all the popular fast food chains have chalked out massive plans for expanding their business and presence throughout the country.

Foreign fast food chains are aggressively increasing their presence in the country. ? Another important reason that makes this industry worth studying is that, though this industry has witnessed a robust growth, there is still a huge underpenetrated market in the tier-II and III cities as mostly these fast-food chains are concentrating on the metro cities in India. 3 Literature Review: The innovation decision process model of Rogers (1995) was adopted in this study because CRM is considered an innovative management strategy.

Rogers defines innovation as “ideas, action programs, or objects appealing as new things to individuals or organizations. ” The innovation decision process has five stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation, and confirmation. In the knowledge stage, companies recognize an innovation and its functions. In the persuasion stage, the firm needs to be convinced that an innovation will bring benefits and competitive advantages, so it begins searching for information about the innovation, such as its costs and benefits.

Organizational characteristics, such as the size of the firm and its external business environment, are influential. The decision stage occurs when the firm decides to adopt, reject, or postpone the innovation. In the implementation stage, the firm puts the innovation to use to achieve its objectives. In the confirmation stage, the firm decides whether to continue or discontinue adoption of the innovation. Recently, consumers’ needs and purchase patterns have changed dramatically.

To meet various needs, companies tend to adopt differentiated and customer-oriented marketing strategies to gain competitive advantage. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one specific example, adopted to create and manage relationships with customers more effectively through the detailed and accurate analysis of consumer data using various information technologies. Improved relationships with consumers can lead to greater customer loyalty, retention, and profitability.

Although the importance of CRM as a successful strategic approach since the 1990s has been widely recognized, there is no consistent definition of it. According to Swift (2001), CRM is “an enterprise approach to understanding and influencing customer behavior through meaningful communications in order to improve customer acquisition, customer retention, customer loyalty, and customer profitability. ” Kincaid (2003) defines CRM as “the strategic use of information, processes, technology, and people to manage the customer’s relationship with the company across the whole customer life cycle. According to Ko et al. (2004), CRM is also defined as the integrated customer management strategy of a firm to efficiently manage customers by providing customized goods and services and maximizing customers’ lifetime values. 4 The challenge for an organization as also highlighted by Peppard (2000) is to move to a situation where the customer starts buying from you rather than being sold to. This new mantra focuses entirely on the customer, and how to provide customer value in the form of tailoring services or products to meet their requirements.

Researchers have identified a variety of technologies related to CRM which include: ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? product development through customer DB analysis product development through customer involvement development of customized products customer mileage reward programs real-time customer services managing customer loyalty managing customer complaints developing member-only access to website customer database development customer categorization based on spending The main conclusions to be drawn from the existing literatures are: ? xisting research has a strong focus on the three particular areas of: effects of customer satisfaction of CRM, customer retention and profit management, and effects of CRM technique on performance; ? ? ? ? there remains debate on whether or not relationship marketing can be extended to consumer markets with firms having a relationship orientation then implementing CRM; conceptually, sequential effects from CRM implementation to enhanced financial performance are expected, but have not been explored; the research stream in Japan has focused on techniques of data analysis and data mining aspects of CRM

Most systems and processes in this information technology (IT) driven era have some form of hitech interface in transforming inputs to outputs. The restaurant industry is no different, in that IT has played some role in changing a customer? s dining experience over the years—the way in 5 which the meal is prepared, the speed at which it is delivered, the way an order is received, just to name a few. With the advent of new technology and its impact on restaurant operations, one would believe that most firms in the restaurant industry would be IT oriented in the production and delivery of goods and services.

Specifically, the study addresses three questions: (1) How do full-service restaurant operators generally view the impact of IT? (2) Is there a difference between full-service chain and independent restaurant firms in the adoption, utilization, and implementation of such technology? (3) What are the reasons some chain and/or independent restaurant firms choose not to invest in IT, while others do and what are the implications? The paper first explores why technology matters and the IT-related trends in the restaurant industry followed by a description of the case study approach and the methodology used in this study.

Findings from the restaurants used in the case study ensue, followed by propositions, implications and recommendations while ending with limitations and conclusions. Before exploring each topic, it is essential to state that technology in this paper is referred to as IT, which is defined as „„the development, installation, and implementation of computer systems and applications? ? Customer feed-back mechanisms. Industry trends indicate that specific areas being targeted by some restaurants firms include aggressive solicitation of feedback from customers regarding perception of restaurant performance.

To some extent, „„comment cards? and „„mystery shoppers? are being slowly replaced by customer tracking tools which measure the needs of all customers (Hayes, 2002). Such a process includes analysis of online surveys completed by restaurant customers (Liddle, 2001). ? Management of repeat business. Another area targeted by restaurants for innovation through IT is the attempt to increase repeat business. One such area is the use of online reservation systems (Ruggless, 2003). 6 ? Management of marketing and service.

Closely connected to frequent diner programs are advances in IT that allow restaurants to gather and store specific information about its customers, which comes mostly from comment cards/online surveys and POS data (Prewitt, 1997). By knowing customers? likes and dislikes and their consumption patterns, firms are able to position their product/service offerings more effectively while being able to offer them special deals. Another area that restaurants look at when trying to improve performance is the speed of service.

Restaurant firms, both chains and independents, have started to use handheld devices that allow servers to remotely notify management of a dirty table, so that it can be cleaned and re-set faster for another set of patrons as well as place orders in the kitchen. ? IT and restaurant operations management. The use of technology to improve performance can be seen in use of integrated business solution software to help run restaurants operations. A process refers to a collection of tasks or activities that together result in a desired business outcome.

Stated differently, a business process refers to a group of activities that convert organizational inputs (e. g. , human resources) into desired outputs (e. g. , successful new products). Given that groups of tasks can be subdivided or aggregated into lower and higher level processes, the specific nature (i. e. , inputs and outputs) of a business process depends on the level of aggregation used to define it. For instance, define CRM as a macrolevel (i. e. , highly aggregated) process that subsumes numerous subprocesses, such as prospect identification and customer knowledge creation.