User roles and personalisation in CRM

Whilst explaining why user roles and personalisation are important in Customer Relationship Management, Khalid Sheikh also reveals some CRM secrets

The role concept ensures that the users get the information most pertinent to them. CRM solutions provided by major vendors like SAP can be accessed through an enterprise portal that comes bundled with the e-business suite. Portals provide an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand, and personalised browser interface to users. The enterprise portal can be used to access all internal and external enterprise information, applications, and services that users need in their personal working environment through the Internet. The screen layout of the portal is adapted for the relevant roles of the user in his company or his work centre. A user can have multiple roles, which he can switch at will. A role-based portal offers customised content and services for employees, partners, customers, and suppliers.

Role

A role defines a group of activities—and the data and functions corresponding to those activities—carried out by a person to achieve a desired business aim. A role (and not a person) determines how a business process will be carried out and how this process will lead to the attainment of a particular business aim. The roles determine interface layouts, services, information, and applications required for each user. Roles are flexible and can be changed easily.

The following objects can be taken into consideration for defining a role:

• Transactions
• Reports
• Links to general websites
• Exportable files
• Links to external systems
• Links to knowledge warehouse

• iViews: An integrated view in mySAP e-business suite is a self-contained, XML-based presentation element that acts as a window to any enterprise application. iViews offer role-based content such as e-mail, diary, Web news, etc. iViews provide awareness of events and enable the rapid creation of information building blocks from different enterprise applications, providing flexibility to users).
• Work sets: A work set in mySAP e-business suite is a collection of application screens and iViews on a page (or series of pages) that allows users to better perform a task defined in their role.

From a semantics perspective, the primary function of a role is to provide a navigation hierarchy of pages, work sets, iViews, and user interfaces from applications. The navigation display for users is assembled according to their roles. Users are assigned roles that reflect their function in a company. Roles can be project-based, group-based, or even individual user based—each user can have a personal user role that contains favourites and personal pages. The role definition enables a content provider to assemble everything that a user typically requires for performing the tasks required by his role in the company.

Personalisation

The role concept is extended further by personalisation. Personalisation can determine the page layout, the look and feel of the portal, and even which information users receive and how they receive it. The role concept ensures that the users get the information most pertinent to them, while personalisation means they receive the information in the format most suitable for them.

There are three ways to define personalisation:

• Personalisation at the administrator level: Administrators can define personalisation for each user by setting the design of the portal structure for different users. Administrator can define roles, work sets, portal layout, and access methods for different users.

Given below are some examples:

• The administrator can restrict certain customers so that they can access the portal only through a WAP phone or Pocket PC—the administrator then ensures that portal pages are available to those customers only in those formats.
• Administrator can lock specific iViews to certain pages meant for suppliers so that they can customise the portal or change a view. These permissions are incorporated into user permissions in the Page Builder and through the iView Server (these are the components of the Enterprise Portal).
• The administrator can implement a unified style across applications that are accessed through the portal. Using a style-sheet editor, an administrator can pass portal settings through application programming interfaces (APIs) to the applications accessed through the portal.
• Personalisation at the user level: Users can personalise their content within the control limits set by the administrator. Users can, for example, change the location and order of pages, change the iView order, and build their own role using iViews available through channels. Channels contain iViews not associated with role-related tasks defined by the administrator. iViews contained in channels can be dragged into the portal pages by the end-user to allow additional personalisation.
• Automatic personalisation through predictive technology: Predictive technology allows for automatic personalisation based on user type, browser type, device type (WAP phone, Pocket PC, PDA, etc.), user location (whether inside or outside the firewall), connection bandwidth, and the type of event being handled.

Roles available for direct use in mySAP CRM

mySAP Enterprise Portals generally offer over 200 predefined roles for various SAP solutions such as Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management and Supplier Relationship Management. These roles can be tailored further to suit specific conditions and requirements of a particular company. The roles available specifically for mySAP CRM are listed in Table 1.

CRM, like database marketing, involves two very different types of professionals:

• Constructors (people with technical skills): This group comprises people who know about computers and software; who understand things like, merge/purge, postal pre-sort, segmentation, data enhancement, coding, modelling and profiling.
• Creators (people with marketing skills): This group comprises people who understand the motivation of customers and how to use a database to build relationships with them, leading to increased loyalty and repeat sales. These people are conversant with the strategy and tactics of database marketing, customer lifetime value, recency, frequency, monetary (RFM) analysis, affinity tables, and attrition analysis. These are the professionals who understand a customer’s value to the company and company’s value to customers. Authority, long-term budgets, objectives, and tools to communicate effectively with customers are some of the factors that are critical to their success.

A new breed of technology executives—known as business technologists, have emerged in the recent past. They are technology staffers with both business and technology skills, able to communicate with non-technologists and thoroughly versed in the business where they work.

Customer in the role of a self-serving user

A customer-facing website enables customers to communicate to a company exactly and precisely what they want and need. The Internet enables a company to establish a dialogue with individual customers. This is where the customers themselves assume a role of a self-serviced user. Customers are now ready to provide information about themselves in exchange for specific services rendered. This means companies now don’t have to rely on information about the customer, instead, they can pay attention to information from the customer. Companies must, however, take care that they don’t ask for the information until a trust-based relationship has been built and that they don’t ask for the same information more than once. An important thing to note is that once customers have invested their time in giving you their profile information, it is unlikely they will go to a competitor to start all over again.

Collaborative filtering

This is a technique in which websites take advantage of the low cost of interacting with customers online to gather and store information on individual customer tastes and preferences. A site combines the preferences and interactions of similar users. The site then compares the preferences of one customer with those of others in the database and then makes recommendations to the customer. The more is known about a given customer, the more useful the site’s recommendations can be.

Narrowcasting rather than broadcasting

The inherent characteristics of the Internet do not provide a welcome mat for marketing and advertising strategies of the past. The Internet is not about mass marketing; it is heading solidly in the direction of one-to-one direct marketing. It is not about selling a can of soup, a beauty treatment product, or a pair of trousers through entertainment on radio or television; it is about providing information that has unique value about a can of soup, a beauty treatment product, and a pair of trousers. Web-enabled CRM is about narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. And the Internet can be thought of as a salesperson in every home.

A state-of-the-art website includes features that are aimed at ensuring customers keep coming back, such as a gift reminder service, order status change alerts, a re-order reminder for regular customers, and a service that remembers past orders to make re-ordering easier. To accomplish this, the company sends online customers an e-mail reminder with an embedded link to a Web page with an order form already filled out.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, believes the Internet store of future should be so smart and personal that it will be able to guess what the customer wants before the customer knows it himself. He says, “We can do that online. We can make it your store, tailor-made for you. If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store; we should have 4.5 million stores. The Internet can bring the personal touch back to commerce, only this time on a mass scale.”

Providing information that has a unique value to customers based on information from them is an essential feature of CRM that is facilitated by the Web. For example, when you sign on at amazon.com, you will see a message at the top of the screen entitled ‘Personal Recommendations.’ The companies trying to use the Internet for marketing should make sure that they fulfil the Internet self-service imperative, and should try synthesise the three elements of transactional content, namely transactions, interactivity, and content, into a rich experience. The Web is a two-way or multi-way medium—rather than merely using it as an advertising medium displaying mass-media messages, marketers need to use it as a feedback loop for delivering personal experience and trust to customers.

The secret of CRM is to listen and learn, not tell and sell, and that makes feedback, interaction, and communication the essentials for a successful online CRM solution.

The author is associate professor of Supply Chain Management at the S P Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai. He can be contacted at khalid_sheikh@hotmail.com