Relationship Marketing Course of MBA at University of British Columbia
Sauder School of Business > University of British Columbia
BAMA 502 Relationship Marketing
Prerequisite
MBA Core
The customer experience is the next competitive battleground
- Jerry Gregoire, CIO, Dell Computers
Whether you are majoring in Strategy, Marketing, Operations, IT, HR, or Accounting, you have a strategic role to play in the next competitive battleground. And if you’re an entrepreneur, this is the key to differentiation.
The way to create value for your firm is to first create value for your customer, every time they see, think about, or experience a contact during their relationship with your organization. Research shows that if you can retain just 5% more of your customers each year, you can reap profit increases of up to 95%. Leading organizations experiencing results like these understand the critical need to strategically connect all areas of the firm with its external environment, not just “sales” or “customer service”. Few firms find it easy to do well, because often they rely on CRM systems, but 70-80% of Customer Relationship Management implementations fail - want to know why?
At the end of the day, only customers produce cash flow, and it requires senior management commitment to build customer value by leveraging knowledge and information across internal functions and through organizational layers to create structures and processes that optimize the customer experience and address key opportunities and threats in the market environment.
Note that this is NOT a “Sales”, “Customer Service” or “CRM” course, although we will explore these topics and more. Instead, it debunks and makes sense of a lot of the current marketing buzzwords and gets past them to provide very practical approaches to how you can create customer value by building customer-managed relationships - the opposite of CRM. Creating Value for Your Customers and Your Firm is a strategic corporate initiative that requires focus at the senior management level, cooperation among various departments, and compatible systems to share data. Only in this way can you ensure that all areas of the organization beyond the sales and marketing group understand client needs and wants, and can provide appropriate information, problem solving, and servicing that leads to profitable long-term relationships.