Question

Read the Best Buy story. What additional CRM techniques do you think Best Buy could use to step it up even more and increase sales in the process? Be specific and creative!

Answer 1

Customer Relationship Management is a combination of practices, technologies and strategies that companies use to manage and analyze customer interactions. The goal of CRM is customer retention, growth in sales and improving the overall customer service relationships.

Before August 2012 Best Buy was not doing well. There was scandal of the CEO and the founder had also resigned as the chairman of the company and started a hostile take over of the company. The other worrisome fact for the stakeholders was that Hubert Joly was appointed as CEO. The worrisome part being that he had a history of working in hospitality and travel company and not retail. But Hubert Joly (CEO) with Sharon McCollam (CFO) turned the company around by using many different techniques and tactics. These included cutting under-performing stores, cancelling trips to world economic forums, selling off private jets and cancelling advertisements in NASCAR and Super Bowls. Other than that they started guaranteeing price math so as to compete with amazon. Generally people will come to the stores and check out the gadgets and then order it from Amazon due to the cheaper prices. The employees were trained in new and upcoming technologies. They also made deals with big electronics companies like Apple, Samsung and Microsoft. Other than this the customers also got house calls from the employees for installation of their electronic devices. All this helped them in increasing store sales by 2.5% on black Friday which was their highest increase in years. Now looking forward they can use CRM in the following ways to increase their sales even more:

1. CRM helps in market automation. This helps in automation in repetitive tasks which helps in enhancing the market efforts.

2. CRM can be used for sales force automation. This tool tracks customer interactions and automates some functions of sale cycle that help in attracting and obtaining new customers.

3. Workflow automation can also be achieved by using CRM. CRM helps businesses by streamlining everyday low-level mundane tasks which in turn lets the employees concentrate on high-level tasks.

4. CRM helps in user data analyzing which in turn helps in creating a better customer satisfaction rate.

5. CRM can be used for human resource management by tracking employees information such as contact information, benefits in the company and performance reviews which in turn helps human resource department in better internal management of employees.