Participation of Employees in Customer Relationship Marketing: A Case of Indian Banking Sector

Abstract

The way in which companies interact with their customers has changed dramatically over the past few years. Customers’ loyalty towards company is no longer guaranteed in this competitive environment. As a result, companies have found that they need to understand their customers better, and to quickly respond to their wants and needs and that also within shrinking time frame. They want to be proactive in their approach, where the problem starts; while the companies actually loose the customers through their sensitive approach. Today, there are many ways a customer can interact with a bank including via salesperson, web site, catalog, e-mail, trade show exhibit or advertisement. With today's technology, it's possible for each of these contact points to be driven from the same base of information about the customer. But the problem lies in the coordination of these technologies where sales force doesn't know about customers' interactions with the bank’s web site, call center doesn't know the customer was visited by a salesperson last week or the bank sends e-mail without consideration of recent catalog purchases. Consequently, the customer thinks that the bank’s activities are not coordinated. The requirement today is of integrated customer information architecture to support all these applications and thereby preventing coordination problems. The objective of this paper is to discuss about the need for integrated customer information architecture by segmenting and analyzing what the banks have and then serving the customer with right approach. But this is one of the challenging tasks. The challenge is to extract the necessary customer transaction data from these discrete applications and incorporate that data in our CRM-ready data warehouse. It is then that we have closed the loop and can truly attain one-to-one marketing relationships with our customers.