There's a new bug on campus:
B-Schools are catching on to the relationship game, Candice Zachariahs examines.
The customer's always right, always first...and what
not. Well, a few year's ago the customer became a buzzword and managing him
correctly, the name of the game. Sure, there have always been companies that
have done it: only now everyone wants to get in on the game. Customer frenzy
first came bundled into a variety of software technology packages. Companies
bought them - and then didn't know what to do with them. Right about this time,
management students were thinking, 'Boring'. Over the past year or two though
the yawns have subsided and B-Schools grads are rubbing their eyes with fresh
awareness.
What's changed? The fundamental shift has been from technology to application.
"With competition intensifying, and customers becoming more demanding, CRM has
become a sort of survival kit for corporates, " says Harsh Verma, professor of
marketing at FMS, Delhi. Companies have realised that it's not enough to just
have a CRM package, it needs to be aligned to business needs with focused,
measurable goals, "CRM must prove itself in terms of ROI," says Saugata Gupta,
chief of marketing at ICICI prudential. And for that there must be buy-in across
the enterprise.
" Worldwide, companies spend $15-17 bn in collecting information, " says prof R
Sukumar of ISB, " Not more than 15% of this data is actually mined to make
profitable business decisions... A company has to learn how to look through all
that data."
So, application and value are the focus. " You may not make money from the
customer with a single product, but as he buys multiple products you ;start
making money out of him. Along with CRM comes right marketing and
cross-selling," says NMIMS' prof Singh. From the sunrise industries of
insurance, pharma and telecom to FMCG, banking, retail and basically " anything
that has to do with customers directly", companies need managers who are more
sensitive to the customer. In fact, according to market research firm IDC,
worldwide CRM sales will grow from $61 bn in '01 to $148bn in '05 with a
compound annual growth of 25%, "There's a severe shortage of skillsets (in this
area) in India and globally, across industries and geographies, " says
Gourish Hosangadi, MD of SAS, a business intelligence firm.
And where best to plug such skill gaps than at B-schools. So, most Indian
B-schools have introduced either courses that focus on CRM. SAS' Hosangadi says
that his company has seen a 30% increase of academic customers over the past few
years. " Currently, we have provided our tools to the country's top
universities. Growth will continue to be fuelled by demand for people with
analytical skillsets. That is becoming apparent to academic institutions, " he
adds.
Students are at the fore of the revived interest. They've been witness to the
new excitement in the services sector and the growth of retail banking (a big
campus recruiter this year) and insurance. Plus, there's the promise of the
retail industry. " Primarily, I am interested in CRM implementations in the
organised retail sector, " says Kanishka Ghosh, a student at IIM Lucknow. " With
FDI flowing in from '05, this industry is bound to boom... CRM would undoubtedly
play a major role in converting the traditional transactional buyers to loyal
customer."
And while CRM may have been thought of as low-end three or four years ago that
misconception has cleared. ISB's Sukumar says perception is a matter of how the
course is positioned, " We are looking at it more from the angle of how it is
strategic to the organisation, thinking profit and loss."
But is CRM a career? It appears
not. Faculty and practitioners agree that CRM should be studied to understand
its function and role in an organisation. CRM will always be part of a business,
explains Prof Sunil Rai of the SP Jain Institute of Management, " but it will
never be an end in itself."
SP Jain's prof Mayank Shah points out that a course in CRM will give a student a
very strong foundation. " Three or four years in the field would make him for
more successful at designing strategies.
