Customer Relationship Management - Rocket Singh learnings PDF

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Customer Relationship Management Assignment: Movie Review.

Movie: Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year. Customer Relationship Management is an integral part of maintaining an ongoing progress for a company. This movie, Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, by director, Mr. Shimit Amin, starring Ranbir Kapoor, stands to portray that very fact. Although, the story line of this movie is fiction, the values relating to Customer Relationship Management are very real.

The Story. To give a brief introduction to the story, the main plot revolves around a college graduate Harpreet Singh Bedi aspiring to be a salesman. Following his graduation, he joins a company AYS which deals in computer hardware sales including prebuilt systems. Despite having a less-than-impressive resume and no prior experience as a salesman, he is selected for the job as a trainee for the initial half of the movie. After being embarrassed for his inexperience in sales and being asked to leave following the completion of his training period, Harpreet Singh moves on to open his own company, Rocket Sales Corporation and bringing in five employees of AYS as partners into his own company.

The core principal of Rocket Sales was to focus mainly on after-sales service and offering stiff competition with respect to price of prebuilt systems mostly at fifty percent of the price offered by AYS for the product and service combined. Since, the company was established while the partners of Rocket Sales Corporation were still employees at AYS the director of AYS, upon knowledge of this information, sued the company and acquired it. However, the clients of Rocket Sales Corporation were accustomed to better services and justified product prices. AYS could not cope with the demands of these newly acquired clients while the liabilities increased and sales dropped. AYS decided to return Rocket Sales Corporation to its original owners.

Service Quality, Satisfaction and Customer loyalty. The most obvious reference to customer relationship management is observed when it comes to service quality, satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Referring to the Service Gap Model, the company aspires to bridge all gaps one through five to deliver the best quality of service as per their capability. Being originally salesman, the protagonist of our story gathers experience to understand the needs of customers. Further understanding is obtained upon talking on with clients and their statements about what they expect from the company. This bridges gap one and gap two, the Market Gap and the Design Gap. The company promises on delivering their services and does so by promising services at any time as per the customer’s convenience and it delivers on said promises thereby bridging service gap three, the Conformance gap. It is to be noted that at the time the company comprised of only its partners therefore the management interacted directly with its customers therefore there was no error in perception of customer needs. In the movie Harpreet Singh goes as far as offering his personal number to on-screen clients in order to bridge gap three, the communication gap. The combined effect of bridging the above four gaps automatically helps in overcoming gap five, the Customer expectations and perceptions gap. Moreover, along with basic expectations of the customer the service rendered also comprised of delighters and satisfiers. Referring to the Kano model of customer satisfaction, the basic expectation of the customer was to receive what was promised, that is, the computers with the best hardware along with aspects like legal copies of operating systems (most companies opted to sell pirated versions of operating systems to cut costs). The satisfiers would be that the company took conceivably large order seeming beyond their current capacity and delivered without fail. The delighters would be that the company provided service on a short notice even on public holidays whenever required. A company’s profits depend considerably on customer loyalty behaviour. Its growth depends on: Retention, Advocacy and Purchasing. Due to the unparalleled service that company provided, it attracted new clients and retained more customers enough to put AYS in a bind despite being a newer and much smaller company. In the movie, the loyalty of the customers is evident when even after acquiring Rocket Sales, AYS could not cope with the demands of its clients and was forced to let go of the company.

Managing Business Relationships. In an expressive show of integrity, he nurtures relationships between his partners and supplier. In one scene of the movie he refuses to let his parts supplier go when the supplier could barely accommodate the level of demand brought in by Harpreet Singh. Soon it was no longer a problem later in the movie. This established good relations and it is understood that the supplier will most probably prioritise Rocket Sales Corp. over other competitors. To Harpreet Singh, vendors were as important as customers. A small reference to the image and behaviour of the salesman or more appropriately, the interface between both the supplier and clients given the current context, is shown. In a particular scene Harpreet Singh, mentions that he understands people better than he understands numbers and this is proven over the duration of the movie. Harpreet

Singh Bedi is a Punjabi individual and comes across as a genuine and dedicated individual as opposed to a “pushy” salesman. This has a direct impact of clients being more accepting to the individual and sets him apart from others in his profession. The aggregate effect of all above factors resulted in increased customer loyalty to the extent of the clients becoming ‘apostles’ or ‘habitual loyals’. One instance proves that some of the clients may also be categorized as an ‘advocate’ since he was so impressed by the quality of service that he referred the company to one Mr. Imandaar who was also a former employee of AYS but could not cope with the corrupt business practices of his former employer very much like our protagonist. The client valued honesty and integrity above all else and therefore it is seen that both Mr. Imandaar and Harpreet Singh operate in resonance and the status of this client soon elevates to that of a ‘partner’ in the Customer Loyalty Ladder.

Strategic Customer Relationship Management The movie is also deeply intertwined with Strategic Customer Relationship Management. The very fact that the company was offering products and services at half the price of its competitors was a strategy its competitors could not imitate. The strategy of keeping customers happy through after sales service and delivering said service after office hours proved to be the strategic advantage or selling point of Rocket Sales Corp. that set it apart from competitors like AYS. From a people’s perspective, the company aligned itself on the customer’s side in a transaction and applied customer-centric convergent thinking, gauging their needs and offering the best possible solution.

Integration and Alignment of Organisational Processes. Since the partners of the company interacted directly with its clients, and bridging gap three, of the Service Gap model, the idiosyncrasies of the each client was known throughout the organisational strata. Due to this the needs of the customer was conveyed directly to the one providing the service or Girish Reddy in our story, also a partner in Rocket Sales, who was an engineer and in-charge of assembling and repairing computers.

Sales Force Automation. The company implemented Sales Force Automation to streamline the sales process. The partners worked in tandem to achieve this objective. In larger organisations, different departments do not work in close quarters with one another which hinders translation of the customer’s requirements and gives rise to Gap two and Gap three in the Service Quality model....