Case Study 8 Achieving Operation Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications

Case Study 8

Achieving Operation Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications

Question 1

What types of companies are most likely to adopt cloud-based CRM software services? Why? What companies might not be well-suited for this type of software?

Answer

Types of companies that may want to adopt cloud may be any company wanting to consolidate multiple services or applications into one, mainly to reduce electricity, personal or operating costs. Companies that need a Service level agreement or sense of data security would not want to invest into a cloud system. Companies who struggling with a lot of data to be store also prefer to use this. Cutting cost companies are also recommended to use this system.

Cloud-based CRM would help these companies to achieve operational excellent and customer intimacy and released from fixed and operational cost. Not only that, it also allow them to subscribe and cancel without losing large up-front software license and hardware investment.

Some companies are not suit with this software services. Those companies made large investment on solutions that already work, concern about security issues and control of their data are the examples not encourage to use such software. Companies which might independent on their provider also not prefer to do so.  

Question 2

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using cloud-based enterprise applications?

Answer

There are some advantages of using cloud-based enterprise applications. First is automates customer service. This system including order confirmations, follow-up customer satisfaction surveys, and shipping notifications. Customer satisfaction and productivity have sored. Not only that, the system now tracks field activities for more than 10000 accounts, with automated reports and dash boards monitoring key performance indicators, sales calls, and sales volume. Besides, this system able to combine multiple services into one single service such as e-mail, customer records and contact management.

Unfortunately, there are also some disadvantages in this system. Low data security is one of the bugs. Lack of service level agreements and guarantees also considered as the disadvantages of this system.

Question 3

What people, organization, technology issues should be addressed in deciding whether to use a conventional CRM system versus a cloud-based version?

Difficult to understand for ill-trained users, attempting to contain a large and complex group of data.  Poor usability and low usage rates lead many companies to indicate that it was difficult to justify investment in the software without the potential for more tangible gains. Large investment to build and maintain a customer database which requires computer hardware, database software, analytical programme, communication links and skill personnel. There was a risk assessment to the users because the using of this cloud-based software server is not the owner of infrastructure privacy. Dependability should be consider during the decision due to the issues of storing data, difficult to export data, and dependent of provider.