Chiu,+Jennifer

__ Experience Point ([|www.experiencepoint.com/]) __ A technological company focuses on leadership in change management through providing customized simulation game product and relative services. Experience Point has two main target markets: corporate profiles and academic bodies. They sell customized simulation product to these two groups that relationship with their clients should be one of the keys to success. Therefore, customer relationship management and loyalty program will be an interesting area to investigate in this report. One of the loyalty strategy, I believe, that comes with the premium package for their client is the user-controlled login account service on their website ([]). It will be a relevant perspective to look at when considering interpersonal relationship building with their customers. Therefore, from understanding their intensive customer relationship management and strategies, it will provide a detailed picture of the positioning of Experience Point in comparison to their competitors in the change management and simulation industry. To enhance the quality of this report, additional research on one of the main competitors in the industry will be ideal. Information includes size, varieties of products and services, target markets, technological tools adopted, etc. Also, a quick look into one of Experience Point’s former or loyal clients, such as Rotman School of Management, will enhance in the completeness of the report. A quick look into a client using Porter’s five forces analysis and identify issues related to change management and decision making. Results in using Experience Point’s simulation product(s) should be gathered if possible.
 * Competitive Intelligence Case Study Proposal **
 * Organization Overview **
 * Relevant Questions **
 * 1) What is change management leadership?
 * 2) How does technology – simulation game – foster success in change management and decision making for different corporations?
 * 3) How do Experience Point and their simulation games respond to specific customers’ needs or requests?
 * 4) What specific services come with the simulation product before or after a client’s purchase?
 * 5) What is the function for the login account on Experience Point’s website?
 * 6) How does Experience Point execute customer relationship management? Is there any technology involved in this area? What is it?
 * 7) Who are the main competitors in the industry?
 * 8) How does Experience Point position itself in the industry? What is the role of customer relationship management in view of the competition?
 * 9) What are the main elements or factors in building up loyalty customers?
 * Additional Considerations **

**Competitive Intelligence Case Study: Experience Point **
Experience Point is a technological development company focuses on change leadership management through providing default and customized simulation games together with a training package for their clients. Corporate profiles and academic bodies can choose a simulation product – change leadership, decision-making or custom based solution – that suits best the firm or an institution’s current situation, as well as future forecast. Clients include General Electric, Microsoft, Nokia, Rotman School of Management, etc (ExperiencePoint Inc). The company’s mission clearly states the value of their product – Experience Point offers the “perfect” product that integrates fun and learning to help a business professional translate the “perfect practice” into valuable insights and excellence. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce.com ** Like many companies, Customer Relationship management (CRM) is one of the key business success factors for Experience Point. CRM can be defined as any “methodologies, software, and usually Internet capabilities that help an enterprise manage customer relationships in an organized and efficient manner” (Alexandrou). A customer database system is the core value that makes CRM critical to accessing the target customers. Experience Point adopts the CRM information system service from salesforce.com to deal with all customer information. Salesforce.com, Inc is one of the well-established web-based CRM Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies in the sales industry (Salesforce.com, Inc). They offer customized CRM service to companies of different sizes and industries through offering a technology platform for Experience Points (Yahoo! Inc.). The Sales Cloud SaaS package is an ideal CRM information system for Experience Point, especially in the sales perspective. It is an ‘all-in-one’ sales application aims for a wide scope of functions – information review and management, market penetration and planning, customer communication and retention, business administration and mobilization. The functions collaborate towards both lead and client management. The following are the major areas where the Sales Cloud application has utilized by Experience Point’s personnel in their daily work: __ Accounts and Contacts Database __ There are three main target segments which Experience Point serves: (1) Leads, who are prospective clients, (2) Clients, who have had at least one sales closure and (3) Users, who are the actual participants (players) of the purchased simulation. The account executives (salespeople) keep track of mainly (1) and (2) using Sales Cloud as the information platform. A typical new business tracking process: A lead surfs on Experience Point’s website à Clicks on one of the simulation product link à Clicks on the “Request a Demo” button à (An information page pops up) lead fills in the information and clicks “send” à Salesforce.com receives the request and report the demo to the corresponding account executive’s Sales Cloud account à He/she estimates the request à Creates a new lead account. A typical follow up tracking process: Account executive sends makes a phone call to one of his/her leads accounts à Enter data on the contact page of Sales Cloud – Date, time, reason of the phone call, conversation and other related to the phone call on the Activities page à Reviews all past activities à Plans and puts in the ‘next steps’ such as reminder or mailing list. As shown in the processes above, the CRM software is powerful in managing the customer database. It serves in the operation part of CRM that supports the “front office” business processes (Alexandrou). Every detail and task related to the interaction between the lead/client and the account executive (or other authorized personnel such as a coordinator and technician) is documented and stored for future reference. At the same time, the information is accumulated and integrated across the all authorized account executives’ Sales Cloud platform in the back-end applications to build deep knowledge of every account. It capability to organize and sort accounts and contacts maximizes management efficiency for both personal accounts and the company as a whole. __ Marketing and Leads __ Apart from the marketing and sales strategy – “Request a demo” – on Experience Point’s website, multichannel sales and marketing such as industry events and trade shows, cold-calling, customized e-mail marketing and referral are also adopted by the account executives to reach out to potential clients. This performs the collaboration perspective of CRM, which facilitates communication and interaction with leads/clients from different opportunities and helps coordinate the sales team (Alexandrou). The capability to integrate sources across multi-channels into one technology platform further enhances leads/clients relationship. The “Lead Capture” tool in Sales Cloud enables to record the leads the account executive met in an event with “Lead scoring” to track every contact with priority based on ‘quality’ of a contact to be converted into a client (Salesfor.com, Inc). Not only does it help track all the information about a contact, the criteria and possible actions for routing the lead through a smooth process are automated. __ Opportunities and Quotes __ The database that the account executives built up in Sales Cloud can be filtered and tracked sales opportunities and quotes of each account and all contacts as a whole in various forms of presentation. This is the analytical part of a CRM system. Data gathered from the operational CRM – accounts and contacts – can be analyzed to “segment customers or to identify cross- and up-selling potential” (Alexandrou). All the milestones and decisions set by a personnel, lead/client communications and internal administrations that are opportunity-related are automatically tracked based on costs, quoted amounts, competition, sales stages, etc (Salesforce.com, Inc). __ Analytics and Forecasting __ Sales Cloud helps facilitate sales and business analysis, forecast and decision-making through multiple options to customize sales and marketing reports. For example, the account executive can pull out sales performance spreadsheets by year, account, sales rep, etc through the Sales Cloud platform. Also, it is important to track the conversion rate from a lead account to client account and the effectiveness of the web in capturing leads, such as how many clients who initiated their interest in the simulation through requesting a demo online. The ability to customize reports is significant to all levels of authorized positions to the platform. Apart from the account executive, who possibly pulls out reports to track personal performance, the top management can uncover employees performance and forecast long term business opportunities and positioning. Interestingly, reports about leads/clients’ behaviour towards their marketing strategies can also be tracked as well. For instance, the account executive can customize a report to see how many times a mass newsletter email was read, by whom and by which email addresses. However, reports viewing and customizing by a personnel depends on his/her authority set by the administrator to enhance confidentiality of customer information. __ Mobile __ Salespeople have high mobility at work. The growing popularity of Blackberry and iPhone devices for email tracking and data transfer packages lead to the increasingly importance of mobile information access. An account executive can utilize the Sales Cloud platform with the tools mentioned above while on the go. This enhances efficiency – to make the ‘once-inefficient time’ into an efficient one such as commuting. The availability of a “local data store” makes information accessible even in locations that are without a network connection (Salesforce.com, Inc). Pros and Cons of Experience Point’s Adopted CRM System ** Based on the experience of the Sales Cloud system by an account executive at Experience Point, some pros are identified based on CRM: __ Website Optimization __ The integration between Salesforce’s accounts and contacts feature and Experience Point’s website optimizes the company resources – capability of online sales strategy. The Contact Us email service and availability of product sampling on the website easily transfer into sales opportunities by identifying quality leads. These people who request a sample or demo of a simulation game show immediate interest to the product and, therefore, have a high lead-client conversion rate if the accounts are followed up properly at the right time and right approach. __ Preciseness __ Experience Point focuses on customer relationship building and personalized service. This can be achieved through an effective customer database management system like Sales Cloud, in which all information and actions of a client account are recorded and stored for future reference. Through reviewing the last conversation the account executive had with a lead/client, he/she can plan on the next action or call that is unique to the particular contact. __ Efficiency Maximization __ The ability to share accounts information, review and customize reports and mobilize data across one platform increases productivity and efficiency. Moreover, it also achieves the importance of ‘Talent Retention’ in the company: when a salesperson left the company, his/her accounts and contacts will stay in the database that anyone can follow up on what he/she left behind from looking at the record history. __ Team Cohesiveness Enhancement __ The data and platform sharing makes it more flexible in work delegation as a team. Any account can be followed up by another sales member by pulling out the record from CRM system. This enhances the cohesiveness among the account executives and coordinators and reduces internal competition. __ Flexible Customization __ The capacity to customize reports presentation and user interface of one’s account on the platform makes things more flexible to deal with for all levels of personnel in the company. Different authorized users in different work positions with various responsibilities can easily pull out the specific data that they need instead of one big general report. Some of the cons of the system include: __ People-generated (Manual) Database __ The planning, analyzing and forecasting part of the business cannot be performed if no one generates the database. The tracking, summarizing and customizing performance of the CRM system depends on both quantity and quality of the data the sales people enter into the system. The effectiveness of the customer database comes from the effort of salespeople. Therefore, it is important to train the culture. __ High Service Costs __ Most CRM systems generate high costs in the company operation. Well-established companies like Salesforce.com, Inc charge a significant amount of money per user in the company plus additional advanced features requested. For example, it charges a monthly cost for information access on iPhone. This constrains the company the scope of information sharing due to the high investment cost. __ Complicated Advanced Features __ Basic features such as information recording in Accounts and Contacts on Sales Cloud platform are easy and flexible to manage and customize. However, more advanced features such as Marketing and Leads event managing are tedious to handle. It is hard to keep track of all those advanced and upcoming features especially when they have no time for online tutorial or training. After-sale Services: Training and Technical Supports ** CRM does not end in a sales closure. Indeed, Experience Point provides sufficient technical supports and product training for the users group. Apart from the after-sale follow up by the account executives through the continued communication with the clients, they also use a support page service from Salesforce.com, Inc to track what services or issues a user concerned. The technicians in the company contact the users direct to help solve product issues. Moreover, the product performance can also be tracked through pulling out reports to analyze the number of support requests, causes, facts, etc helps improve product development. On-site trainings for preparing in the simulation game and the related theories are provided as well to enhance customer relationship through utilizing all kinds of resources to help achieve the client’s set product (simulation game) goals. On-Premise CRM vs. On-Demand/Hosted CRM ** Experience Point adopted an On-Demand/Hosted CRM system through Salesforce.com, Inc. Hosted CRM is hosted by another company, which provides professional business information system services. It is paid per user and cannot be installed into the companies’ computer system. Instead, paid users login to the service online (Innoveer Solutions). The Sales Cloud SaaS CRM adopted by Experience Point is a growing Hosted CRM niche in the industry. By paying a monthly per-user fee, Experience Point can access to the CRM tools with the included upgrades, maintenance or long-term license with a short registration and installation process (Innoveer Solutions). On the other hand, On-Premise CRM is an in-house operated system service. In view of the difference, it is appropriate that Experience Point adopted SaaS (hosted) type of CRM. First, Experience Point has two major market segments, corporate and academic profiles (ExperiencePoint Inc). Although customer processes are a major driving value to the company, product performance plays a similar role as the technical expertise is an important competitive advantage. Therefore, a standard with optional advanced level of CRM customization provided by a typical hosted CRM system is sufficient. Second, as mentioned above, the account executives prefer basic features than advanced features to keep track of the data. Third, the website and mobile integration are basic and adequate for reaching out at the current size and scope of the company. Fourth, limited technical resources and expertise are available in the company that out-sourcing this aspect to a hosted CRM company is effective. Although it charges a monthly per-user fee, it is still feasible for the small group of salespeople and technicians hired in the company, compared to building in-house CRM. Last but not the least, the data collected is “non-proprietary data” that has less risk in content security and privacy issue (Alexandrou).
 * Organization Overview: Experience Point **

Alexandrou, Marios, “CRM Definition”. __Marios Alexanrou.com__. 10 Nov 2009  Experience Point. __ExperiencePoint Inc__. 2 Nov 2009  Salesforce.com. __Salesforce.com, Inc__. 12 Nov 2009  “Salesforce.com (CRM)”. __Yahoo! Inc__. 12 Nov 2009  “The Solution Discovery – For Choosing between On-Premise and SaaS Applications.” __Innoveer Solutions__. 14 Nov 2009  Catherine Liu, former Account Executive at Experience Point
 * Bibliography**
 * Interviewee **

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