Internet helping CRM to enhance Customer Experience

Abstract

The purpose of my Masters’ Thesis is to first understand what a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is and how it is supporting business. As CRM system is primarily a backbone of every business so as part of the thesis I am keeping my scope primarily to telecommunication industry. After understanding the purpose of CRM system in telco business I explored the idea of how Internet is utilized by the CRM systems to enhance customer experience. I briefly went through the technologies around big data to see how they are supporting this. Although idea was discussed way before with my thesis co-ordinator, but actual work was started during the summer of 2017 and it was concluded in winters of 2017. Qualitative method of research was opted to gather the data for the research and open ended interviews were conducted for these. Research was done from two aspects. Firstly from a telecom organization which is using few legacy CRM systems and also going through a CRM consolidating and digital transformation. Second was from a product based organizations’ point of view which has CRM and various other telecom related products. Research had quite interesting aspects and findings like it is an early stage in telcos to start using the power of Internet combined with CRM to enhance customer experience. No one denies the capability of the CRM systems to utilize this, but seems like people need to understand it first. People need to unlearn what they have been doing from years and adopt the new CRM and then only they will be able to make most out of it. New CRM on cloud, in line with social media, capabilities like Omni-channel and concept to follow the customer wherever they go were the key aspects of the new CRM systems and technologies around Big data are supporting it.