CIS 500 week 6 Discussion: Enterprise Systems

Enterprise Systems (20 points)

The executive management team of a medium-sized business wants to be more customer focused in the marketplace. Because you oversee the CRM, you have been assigned to support the newly-created social media marketing plan: 

What are the best steps to identify customers and the different ways they use to contact your company? Defend your answer. 

Explain to the executive management team how the steps you recommended will be incorporated in the organization’s ERP. 

Discussion

Your ideal customer is someone who gets their exact needs met by what we are offering. A perfect client is someone who benefits from our product or service. However, it also defined as someone we most want to target with our marketing and promotions based on our current business situation. We have to clarify some questions answer to get more customer are; (i) What problems do we solve for them or what challenges do you address? (ii) Why should people buy from us instead of our competitors? (iii) Who benefits the most from our product or service?

Attracting customers is critical to the success of our business. To achieve this goal, we can throw together an alternative marketing plan and hope for the best, or you can take time to determine who is most likely to want or need what we have to sell.

Identify target customers:

Create a customer profile:

The people who are most likely to buy our products or services share specific characteristics. The first step toward identifying these prospects is putting together a customer profile. It is necessarily a detailed description of our target demographic that includes:

•    Age —This is important because customers in different age groups will respond differently to how our product designed and marketed.

•    Gender —Generally speaking, men’s and women’s needs and goals are often strikingly different. If we promote our business in a way that fails to address these differences, we could end up attracting few people of either gender.

•    Income level — Knowing how much disposable income our customers possess should directly influence our marketing strategies. Low-income families may draw to products or services that help save them money. Customers in higher-income brackets may respond more favorably to marketing that stresses luxury and exclusivity.

•    Location — The United States is a big country. The buying habits of urban residents often differ from those of people living in rural areas. Where people reside and the types of communities they live in influence their purchasing preferences.

Other essential characteristics include marital status, occupation or industry, families with (or without) children, ethnic groups, and hobbies and interests.

Conduct market research:

 We can learn about our target audience through primary and secondary market research. Fundamental analysis involves learning about customer buying habits through direct contacts, such as:

•    Surveys — Distribute surveys to existing and potential customers via paper, email, or a web-based service like Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey.

•    Interviews — Talk to people we trust and whose purchasing habits dovetail with our small business. At trade shows, for example, stand in a high-traffic area and ask people to answer a few short questions.

•    Focus groups — Get feedback from a small group of consumers who fit our customer profile through Q&A sessions and group discussions.

ERP is an acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning, but even its full name does not shed much light on what ERP is or what it does. For that, we need to take a step back and think about all of the various processes that are essential to running a business, including inventory and order management, accounting, human resources, customer relationship management (CRM), and beyond. At its most basic level, ERP software integrates these various functions into one complete system to streamline processes and information across the entire organization.

The central feature of all ERP systems is a shared database that supports multiple functions used by different business units. In practice, this means that employees in different divisions—for example, accounting and sales—can rely on the same information for their specific needs. ERP software also offers some degree of synchronized reporting and automation.

We can include in ERP (CRM) our sales orders automatically flowing into the financial system without any manual re-keying, the order management department can process requests more quickly and accurately, and the finance department can close the books faster.