The Sales Force Customer Relationship Management in Taleo
The use of CRM by Taleo presents several opportunities for the company to create and deliver significant value to its stakeholders. The use of CRM by the company will offer an opportunity to improve the quality and efficiency of the services offered by the company. This is important because managers will be able to carry out the company’s operations with the least wastage in resources while the improved quality of service will create value to the company’s customers. CRM will act as a decision support system for the company’s management and will assist in the making decisions which best meet the objectives of the company. The use of CRM will also enable the company develop a closer and efficient relationships with its customers who will benefit from increased value of services and products. Increased revenue from increased efficiency in operations and customer satisfaction ultimately leads to increased earnings attributable to shareholders. The company’s return on investments will be improved by the enhanced financial performance as a result of the usage of the CRM.
Taleo’s large customer base which is composed of many large companies in the country is strength and supporting this number of customers by using the Sales force CRM would only increase the quality of service to the customers. The company reputation offers it an opportunity for increasing its customer base and further growing its revenues. However, the company faces a threat to its growth potential from an increased number of competitors offering the same service and targeting the same market which Taleo operates. This has the potential of significantly eroding Taleo’s market share and adversely affecting the growth of the company. This implies that for the company to continue on its success streak, the customer relationship management should be periodically reviewed to ensure that quality service and customer value creation is being improved at all times. The use of Sales force CRM software may become obsolete within a very short duration and fail to deliver the desired customer value. This will impact negatively on the company’s financial and operational performance (Goldenberg 2002).
Taleo should institute measures to ensure that the company’s CRM is always specific to the company’s and its customer’s needs. The company should develop a CRM strategy which will enable it to continuously monitor the relevance of the company’s customer relationship management. The company should put in place a team to be in charge of the CRM and which will make continuous periodical evaluations of the company’s CRM and make recommendations on the adjustments that need to be made to ensure that the company remains competitive and continues to deliver superior customer value creation. This will effectively deal with the commercial threats and operational weaknesses the company may be facing (Dyche 2002).
CRM solutions may fail due to several reasons. The lack of clear and well defined objectives for the CRM of a company will ultimately lead to the failure of the CRM (Anderson & Kerr 2002). Lack of clear definition of objectives of the CRM in the company will mean that the company’s goals will not be integrated into CRM and value creation for the company’s stakeholders will fail. The absence of an effective measure of the performance of the CRM is also a reason to the failure of many CRM solutions. The performance of the CRM should be continuously monitored and its performance benchmarked against the set standards of performance that the organization expects (Peel 2002).
Database creation by Taleo is done by using the data collected through the use of CRM. A database of the company’s customers is created by the use of the details obtained about customers by the CRM. The details contained in the database are useful in carrying out customer analysis to identify ways of developing specific tailor made solutions to each customer of the company. The CRM also provides data which is used for sales cycle analysis and which is important in predicting the future demand and anticipate the level of sales by the company and thus make adjustments in operations accordingly.
The database created through the use of CRM is also used to classify the company’s customers appropriately and enable the company to select the most profitable customers. The use of CRM also enables the company to identify potentially profitable customers and develop strategies for targeting them and bringing them to the company. The company uses the data obtained from the CRM to develop customer profiles and using these profiles to develop the most appropriate relationship marketing strategies for each customer. The use of the CRM enables the company to develop a privacy policy regarding the company’s relationships with its customers.
The CRM employed by Taleo is used for metrics purposes. It enables the company to measure its performance and support the decisions by customers, managers and shareholders by setting performance standards upon which the actual performance is benchmarked and appropriate corrective action taken by relevant stakeholders to correct any deviations.
References
Anderson, K. & Kerr, C. (2002). Customer relationship management. New York: McGraw- Hill Professional.
Dyche, J. (2002). The CRM handbook: a business guide to customer Relationship management. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.
Goldenberg, B. J. (2002). CRM automation. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Peel, J. (2002). CRM: redefining customer relationship management. Woburn, MA: Digital Press.
