Question

1. Describe why customer relationship management, or customer strategy, needs to be an enterprise-wide strategy. How would it affect each of the five principal business functions?
   1. Financial
   2. Production, logistics, and service delivery
   3. Marketing communications, customer service, and interaction
   4. Sales distribution and channel management
   5. Organizational management strategy

Answer 1

a. Financial - in this angle, the strategies need to be enterprise-wide to facilitate proper allocation of resources and ensuring the strategy benefits the entire organization.

b. Production, logistics, and service delivery - Only an enterprise-wide strategy implementation would help the organization reap the benefits of the new strategies. These all functions are interconnected and thus, need to be involved together in creating value for customers and combining forces to implement new strategies.

c. Marketing communications, customer service, and interaction - It is neither logical nor ethical for different departments to have different communications and customer relationship management strategies. Thus, the improvements or changes must be implemented across the organization.

d. Sales distribution and channel management - This too, similar to marketing, must have similar strategies so that they can benefit from success of the new strategy. Also, implementing enterprise-wide strategy would help the sales effectively plan it's distribution and channel management to unified strengths and strategic assets.

e. Organizational management strategy - All the parts and departments of the organization would be on one page, that is involved in implementing the new strategy. Thus, none would be leading or lagging. As a result, there will be a unity among employees across different departments of the firm.