MNG03218 - CRM Strategy and Implementation in British Airways

This report provides an analysis of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) within British Airways, focusing on the implementation of the Teradata CRM (TCRM) solution and its impact on the organization's information usage and strategy. It examines the transition from traditional information systems to an Integrated Commercial Warehouse (ICW) and highlights the benefits of centralized data for improved decision-making and cost reduction. The report details the challenges faced with previous systems, such as the Customer Data Warehouse (CDW), and explains why the switch to TCRM on the ICW was more efficient. Key aspects covered include the configuration of the CRM, its resources, future drivers, and overall benefits for British Airways, emphasizing improvements in data access, performance, and data quality. The report concludes by outlining future plans for leveraging the CRM system to enhance business opportunities and productivity.

Running head: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
Customer Relationship Management
[Name of the Student]
[Name of the University]
[Author note]

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To,
[Name of the Sponsor]
Thanks for the interest that you have made in investing towards the implementation of the
new CRM solution. the main purpose of this letter is for summarizing and for understanding
the CRM systems and the action plan.
we have discussed certain points which has been listed below:
1] Company analysis
2]the CRM Strategy
 the existing strategy of the organization
 the new CRM strategy
3] recommendations for improving the strategy
you said that we are having all these capabilities, that is capable of reducing, the number of
existing defects and would be helping in reduction and addressing the future defeats as well
which would allow you to recapture the production costs. We have thought of implementing
a new CRM system which would be used in order to make the business process much easier.
Thanks, and regards
[Name]
[Date]

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Abstract:
The Organization British Airways has been associated with making drastic cost savings by
making use of external spend. This has been associated with leading towards to the
significant changes in the CRM environment of British Airways. The CRM that is to be used
would be heling the organization in reducing the cost along with providing of more
functionality which in turn would be leading to the increased usage of the services by the
organization, British Airways. The new CRM system that is to be implemented is the
Teradata CRM solution or the TCRM.
The report has been associated with examining the impact of the TCRM upon the usage of
the information and the strategy used by the British Airways. The term CRM generally refers
to the practices or the strategies and the technologies that are used by various companies for
the purpose of managing and analyzing the interactions conducted with the customers as well
as the data throughout he customer lifecycle. The CRM is generally having the goal of
improving the customer relationships along assisting the organizations in retention and
driving the sales growth. CRM is responsible for the compilation of the customer data that are
gathered from various channels or the points of contact between the company and the
customers and this might be including the website of the company, direct mails and many
more.

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Table of Contents
Introduction:...................................................................................................................3
Discussion:.....................................................................................................................4
Customers of British Airways:...................................................................................4
The traditional information system of British Airways:............................................5
New CRM:.................................................................................................................8
The configuration of the CRM:..............................................................................8
Resource of the CRM:............................................................................................8
The future drivers of the CRM:..............................................................................8
Benefits of the CRM:.............................................................................................9
Future plans:.........................................................................................................11
Conclusion:..................................................................................................................12
References:...................................................................................................................13

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Introduction:
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is considered to be strategy associated
with the management of the organization’s relationship and the interaction with the customers
as well as with the potential customers (Jeffery et al. 2017). CRM is the technology that helps
the customers in remaining connected with the customers streamline processes along with
helping in increasing the profitability. CRM is the tool which is utilized for contacting the
management or sales management and many more. CRM system is having a very simple goal
and that is improving business relationships.
CRM is associated with the usage of data analysis regarding the customer's history
with the organization so as to improve the business relationship existing between the
customers and the organization which is specially focused upon the retention of the
customers which is initially responsible for driving the sales growth (Navimipour and Soltani
2016). The CRM approach is associated with compiling of the data collected from various
communication channels. The CRM approach along with the systems facilitating it is used by
the business for the purpose of learning more about the targeted audience and how the needs
of the customers can be met in the best way possible.
This report is associated with proposing a suitable CRM system that would be helping
the organization in improving the existing manual information system of the British Airways
along with helping in the creation of new business opportunities and improving the
productivity of the organization.

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Discussion:
Customers of British Airways:
The organization British Airways is a user of the Teradata and for that reason, they
should be associated with the launching of an initiative so as to combine all the information
that are gathered from all across an organization into an Integrated Commercial Warehouse
of the ICW. The major vision of the ICW would be including the simplification of the
decision-making process which is to be done by simplification of the IT infrastructure and by
improving the decision support capabilities of the organization (Hassan et al. 2015). The ICW
would be consisting of 8 node Teradata Warehouse which would be responsible for housing
the data received from different sections of the business like the sales, receivable accounts,
customers and many more.
The centralization of the data is likely to bring a lot of benefits for British Airways
that is a single source of information would be helping in allowing the business users to find
rapid answers of the critical questions related to the understanding of the customer and the
business performances (Kumar and Reinartz 2018). This, in turn, can be utilized for the
purpose of making informed decisions which are likely to have an impact upon the future
competitiveness of the organization.
Recently it has been seen that there exist many organizations which are strangled due
to lack of sharing information between the various functional departments. The existence of
an integrated information source would not only be helping in improving the decision-making
responsiveness but would also be helping in the identification of the various cost reduction
initiatives (Navimipour and Soltani 2016). Besides this, it is also to be stated that an
integrated information source is also having very low-cost maintenance. The subject area
which is the largest on ICW is the information of the customers and the British Airways is

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associated with the usage of the Teradata CRM application which sits on the ICW so as to
organize all the marketing related communications.
The traditional information system of British Airways:
The marketing group of British Airways mainly consists of regional offices which are
associated with the creation of marketing campaigns which are independent in nature and
leds to operations which are fragmented along with having the potential of having
communications that are redundant (Anshari et al. 2015). The formation of the Relationship
Marketing Department by the British Airways helped in conducting of the campaigns along
with executive club analyses by the Analyst Team associated with the usage of the SAS along
with the Objects of the Business. The analysts were solely associated with the identification
of the audiences and for pulling off the contact files so as to execute all the campaigns.
Followed by this the organization was associated with the implementation of the
CDW or the Customer Data Warehouse that is based upon Oracle and the codename was
“Oceanwave”. Despite all this it almost took 2 years for the analytical team to become
capable of using this information for the campaigns as well as for reporting. There existed
numerous issues associated with the usage of the CWD which includes the following:
a. Complexity: The structure of the data was seen to be different from the previous
systems and is not designed for condcting the various analytic purposes. This, in turn,
was initially responsible for making this very difficult to understand along with
becoming time-consuming so as to be used.
b. Response to Queries: Usage of the customer data in different analytic operation
involved a lot of joins which was responsible for making the queries slow along with
making them complicated (Jeffery et al. 2017). For this reason, they required an

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additional advanced skill for the purpose of creating the SQL related queries even for
generating the simplest lists.
c. Performance problems: The CDW is also utilized as a source of operational data of
the OCD or the Operations Customer Database that is responsible for having a huge
impact upon the analytical users.
d. Training related problem: The contractors required a lot of time as well as the effort
for the purpose of providing training to the SAS users related to the ways of accessing
and using the data.
e. Quality of the data: There existed numerous questions related to the quality of data
and this was a major reason lying behind the undermining of the confidence of the
analytical team regarding the data.
Simple campaigns were conducted by making use of the Vantage solution against the
CDW. Besides this, the Analyst teams were also associated with the management of more
sophisticated campaigns by usage of SAS combination, the objectives of the Business and the
local databases (Hassan et al. 2015). But it was seen that the Vantage solution if very
expensive to be used and is also inadequate. Due to the existence of the older unsupported
version of vantage in British Airways along with the limited internal IT support was
responsible for taking two or three days for building the bi-weekly queries.
The main usage of the Vantage solution was aimed at managing the campaigns
conducted at two Carlson Marketing Group or the CMG locations in Minneapolis and in
London. In Minneapolis the campaign as seen to be quite complicated as well as costly as it
involved the selection of the audiences and database pulls by usage of the Business Objects
and the SAS analysis (Krishna and Ravi 2016). Followed by this the organization also need to
make some drastic savings in the cost along with the external spends which meant the
outsources CMG operation in London had to be closed under very short notice. This led to

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the formation of an interim replacement process that was responsible for filling up the gaps.
The interim solution provided was associated with the enabling of the Campaign Operations
Team so as to continue towards the production of campaigns but despite this, there existed
the need of support from the SAS analyst along with IT. The organization also started to find
ways by which the external costs can be reduced related to the execution of the campaigns in
North America and this was done by the simplification of the processes and the Carlson IT
support costs at Minneapolis (Kumar and Reinartz 2018). At this point of time, the
organization was associated with the usage of the Teradata CRM upon the ICW. Switching of
the organization from the usage of the CDW to ICW is seen to be faster and less painful than
CDW implementation due to numerous reasons and this included the following:
Natural steps: The change of the CWD to ICW is not as great in terms of the relational
database.
Simplicity: The structure of data of the ICW was heavily influenced by the analytic
requirements and for this reason there existed a very simple structure however the cutover to
the CDW took almost two years and for moving on to the ICW took only one month.
Performance: There was a significant increase in improvement in the speed of accessing the
data on Teradata. Besides this, it helped in the cutting down the time required for responding
to complex queries to minutes from hours and to hours from days.
Quality of the data: The issues related to the qualities were easily identifiable along with
helping in the implementation of appropriate actions so as to resolve the issues.
Training: The training could be completed within one day and this initially led to the usage
of only the ICW by all the Marketing Analysts within one month.
Access to the data: The bedded-in tool TCRM helped in accessing the ICW.

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Correct tools: The usage of the right analysis tool would be associated with helping a lot in
avoiding the various kind of issues faced by the restrictions in the length of the name.
New CRM:
The organization British Airways needs to roll out an integrated campaign
management solution for its user base in numerous locations. The modules that are to be
implemented would be consisting of the communication manager and segmentation, TCRM
is the new CRM that is to be linked with the operational data of the ICW and this information
mainly includes the flights which have been canceled, the number of bags, the delays, the
type of check-in and many more (Nyadzayo and Khajehzadeh 2016). This new CRM is to be
implemented in 4 major locations which would be including the British Airways Head Office
London, ADP Camberley UK, BA New York, and Carlson Minneapolis.
The configuration of the CRM:
The Teradata warehouse of British Airways acts as the source of data for the new
CRM that is to be implemented. This would be consisting of an 8 Node Teradata 5250
consisting of more than 4 Terabytes of the User Disc. TCRM can be considered to be the
largest application which sits on the ICW and besides this, the TCRM would be supported by
two middle-tier servers along with 3test environments and a production environment.
Resource of the CRM:
The New TCRM system would be supported internally by a single team of the IT
department which would be covering the day to day support as well as the development
(Nazir et al. 2015). This team would be including 3.5 IT support and Development along
with a one business consultant. There would also remain 8 Super Users or 11Operational
users along with 10-20 casual users as well.

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The future drivers of the CRM:
 Requirements related to certain campaigns
 Relaunching of the loyalty program or the realignment of the business
 Cost savings
 Requirements which are external in nature
 The leisure database
Benefits of the CRM:
There exist various benefits that are likely to be gained by British Airways after the
implementation of the new system and the benefits have been listed below:
Integrated form of information:
The New CRM would be responsible for supporting the integrated email along with
the direct mails, web channels, and the call centers by making use of only one interface. This
would be acting as a one-stop shop for every communication related to marketing along with
including the Executive Club and the BARCs information or the British Airways Online
Registration Customers. This CRM system would be allowing the organization in leveraging
the large breadth of the information which is held in the ICW. Besides this, the business users
would become capable of getting rapid insights of the customer behavior and would be
associated with using this in driving the proactive 2-way communication (Bhat and Darzi
2016). The new CRM would be enabling the users in adapting and act quickly in accordance
with the newly identified insights of the customers. The customer information would also be
connected to the commercial data of the ICW helping in providing a response to the various
operational events.

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By having a single view of the customers would be helping in making sure of the
compliance along with the Data Protection Act which would be ensuring the preferences
related to privacy that are stored in a single place.
Improved efficiency:
The new CRM is associated enabling significant improvements in the efficiency of
the resources along with improving the timeliness in execution, the end-to-end marketing
processes, the fast response towards the changing business and the conditions of the
customers and the automation of the communications which are standard in nature.
Regarding the efficiency of the resources, a significant number of analysts would be reduced.
The unique feature which the Teradata ICW is having is associated with depicting the fact
that less time would be required by the analyst so as to doe the database administration
(Garrido-Moreno, Lockett and Garcia-Morales 2015). Efficiency improvements would be
made possible by rapid access to the information of the ICW as the users would be capable of
receiving an instantaneous virtual response to the queries. The analysis volume would be
increased as the analysts would be providing more and more sophisticated reports as a
response to the requests that are received from the marketing. This new system would also be
allowing the team in outsourcing the simple communications. All this would be helping in the
overall reduction of the team size; however, this would be helping a lot in increasing the
communication.
Modeling of campaigns and testing:
The new CRM would be helping the team in becoming capable of making new
models and test related campaign strategies. Besides this, the CRM would be used for
building a suite of communications which are generally used for certain personalized
campaigns.

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Reduced marketing costs:
Along with cost-saving achievement by making use of the new CRM by
improvements in the efficiency, the marketing related costs would also be significantly
reduced. This would mainly happen due to the strategic shifting of the off-line
communication to online communication (Amuna et al. 2017). This would be acting as one of
the Customer enabled British Airways objective under the Program Future Size and Shape.
The main aim of this is for the purpose of dealing with British Airways so easy that each and
every customer moves towards choosing in doing it by themselves.
Short implementation time:
The easy data structure is associated with making the implementation much easier and
there is also a significant reduction in the training requirements as they would be done in
house or on the job. The new users of this new CRM would be capable of actioning the
simple communications within a week of being introduced to the new system.
Future plans:
The British Airways should be associated with planning the implementation of the
British Airways Leisure database upon the New CRM system as well as upon the ICW and
thus should be associated with realizing the communication plan related to the leisure side of
the business as well. The organization should also be associated with making plans related to
the further development and automation of the multi-step communications. Below are some
of the listed processes which can be automated by usage of the Teradata CRM. Step 1:
sending the customers all the outbound communications, Step 2: use or pre-registration so to
make the customers respond, Step 3: The new CRM is associated with the identification of
the customers who are qualified for receiving the rewards, Step 4: The CRM is associated
with the execution of the follow-ups which are targeted and are relevant in nature (Al-Azzam

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and Khasawneh 2017). The functionalities which are made available due to this CRM would
be helping in enabling the organization is the creation of more complex mappings against the
ICW database along with providing the organization with the capability of testing the new
segmentation ideas SQL features of the customers. After the implementation of the
communication plan along with a series of recurring communication the organization would
be having an increased ability to measure the ROI along with the other incremental benefits
related to marketing activities.
Conclusion:
The report helped in concluding to the fact that the usage of the new CRM would be
associated with bringing a lot of benefits to the organization British Airways. The usage of
the TCRM solution would be helping in automating the Marketing of the organization for
numerous ongoing campaigns as well as the customer communications. The CRM would also
be used for the purpose of freeing up the resources that are used for the handling of more
complex campaigns as requested by the various marketing groups. Besides this, most of the
campaigns are the one which can be organized in the past and were also organized as well
and they would be requiring more overhead in the areas of the resources, time and effort. The
usage of the CRM solution the organization would become capable of reallocating the
personnel so as to create, run or manage the customer communications that are based upon a
various set of skills that are required. Besides this, the usage of the highly skilled SQL and
the SAS programmers for running and reconciling the list pulls the automated campaigns
would also be managed by the analyst within the marketing. This automation by the new
CRM would also be allowing the organization in running the campaigns which are more
frequently used and for keeping in touch with the customers on a timely basis.

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References:
Al-Azzam, A. and Khasawneh, R.T., 2017. Social Customer Relationship Management
(SCRM): A Strategy for Customer Engagement. In Strategic Uses of Social Media for
Improved Customer Retention (pp. 45-58). IGI Global.
Amuna, Y.M.A., Al Shobaki, M.J., Naser, S.S.A. and Badwan, J.J., 2017. Understanding
Critical Variables for Customer Relationship Management in Higher Education Institution
from Employees Perspective.
Anshari, M., Alas, Y., Yunus, N., Sabtu, N.I. and Hamid, M.H., 2015. Social customer
relationship management and student empowerment in online learning systems. International
Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 9(2-3), pp.104-121.
Bhat, S.A. and Darzi, M.A., 2016. Customer relationship management: An approach to
competitive advantage in the banking sector by exploring the mediational role of loyalty.
International Journal of Bank Marketing, 34(3), pp.388-410.
Garrido-Moreno, A., Lockett, N. and Garcia-Morales, V., 2015. Exploring the role of
knowledge management practices in fostering customer relationship management as a
catalyst of marketing innovation. Baltic Journal of Management, 10(4), pp.393-412.
Hassan, R.S., Nawaz, A., Lashari, M.N. and Zafar, F., 2015. Effect of customer relationship
management on customer satisfaction. Procedia economics and finance, 23, pp.563-567.
Jeffery, M., Sweeney, R.J., Davis, R.J., Shah, S. and Rzymski, C., 2017. ROI for a Customer
Relationship Management Initiative at GST. Kellogg School of Management Cases, pp.1-22.
Krishna, G.J. and Ravi, V., 2016. Evolutionary computing applied to customer relationship
management: A survey. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 56, pp.30-59.
Kumar, V. and Reinartz, W., 2018. Customer relationship management: Concept, strategy,
and tools. Springer.

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Navimipour, N.J. and Soltani, Z., 2016. The impact of cost, technology acceptance and
employees' satisfaction on the effectiveness of the electronic customer relationship
management systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 55, pp.1052-1066.
Nazir, S., Khan, S., Jamil, R.A. and Mehmood, Q.S., 2015. Impact of customer relationship
management on customer satisfaction in hoteling industry. Journal of Management Info, 2(2),
pp.8-12.
Nyadzayo, M.W. and Khajehzadeh, S., 2016. The antecedents of customer loyalty: A
moderated mediation model of customer relationship management quality and brand image.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 30, pp.262-270.

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Appendix:
British Airways is listed amongst one of the oldest and largest airlines established in
the year of 1919. This organization has always been considered as a leader of the airline
industry and is a founding member of the Oneworld alliance, the organization is considered
to the 5th largest global airlines. The organization is having around 45,000 employees in
around 100 countries situated worldwide and is assisted by more than 40 million passengers
as per the last year record so as to reach their destination. The mainline fleet is costing of
almost more than 270 aircraft which can be categorized into 9 different types. The
organization operates from the world’s biggest international airport that is the London
Heathrow.
British Airways is associated with working in a market that is categorized by the over-
capacity along with slim margins, regulations of the government, influences from various
geopolitical factors as well as high competition. Due to this reason each and every airline is
under constant battle of having a long-term survival. The organization has been associated
with launching its future size and shape so as to respond to all the pressures and others. This
is the program that has been launched aimed at removing the different type of complexities
and also for the purpose of restoring the airlines so as to obtain suitable profitability. This
would also be helping in the fixing of various core businesses and the major goal of this is to
achieve a 10% operating margin in coming years. The plan is likely to bring a different type
of initiatives that are largely based around the stripping costs received from the business.