Firms strive to achieve competitive advantage and gain customer loyalty by working with customers and getting to know them. This allows companies to better serve the needs of their customers. Building

Firms strive to achieve competitive advantage and gain customer loyalty by working with customers and getting to know them. This allows companies to better serve the needs of their customers. Building these customer relationship management systems requires an information technology infrastructure that collects the information and provides management the needed analytics to understand the customer. Many firms have realized a need before the customer does. Take Uber or Travelocity. Both of these firms are giving the customer control and convenience, integrated with the use of technology.

Building CRM capabilities takes time and requires a data warehouse for the analytics. Travelocity started with the building blocks to learn about their customers and the best ways to deliver targeted market campaigns to them. In addition, Travelocity can respond quickly to offers from their suppliers. For example, at 8 AM, a major airline offered travel agencies a special fare from Los Angeles to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Travelocity quickly scanned their customers' browsing behavior, pulled the e-mail addresses of 30,000 people in the Los Angeles area who had browsed, but not bought, tickets to the Caribbean, and then generated an e-mail message to them. The response rate was incredible—with 25 percent of the recipients who had been e-mailed booking flights. This was an effective campaign measured by the response rate or take rate, as well as a highly efficient one as measured by the ROI from the profit on sales of those extra tickets.

SLP Assignment Expectations

Go to https://www.salesforce.com/ and review their solutions.

Write a report in which you identify a business that you, as an entrepreneur, will start. Describe what the business does, the services it sells to its customers, and how you could use Salesforce.com to jump-start the business. Prepare a diagram of the business processes in your firm, showing how you will use Salesforce.com. This should take 2 to 3 pages.