Carnival Cruise Lines Case Study

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Future Needs for CRM System Functionalities: From the long term view, Customer management system can invest in customer loyalty programs and target their top customers with tiered service offerings, which are the beneficial to increase the margins. Some of the technology that exists can be tied together with CRM to be even more successful and strategic like ‘Sail and Sign’. Furthermore, the most investment on the system is one-time implementation cost. Compared to the future profit, I think it is deserved.

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I do believe the CRM system to Carnival Cruise Lines should fall in the Strategic Quadrant, which means information systems are both critical to the firm’s current operations and the planning team foresees new information systems or new functionalities of existing systems to be critical for the future viability and prosperity of the business. (Piccoli, 2012).

For another choice that the company delays or gives up the CRM system, the failure rate and huge cost should be taken into consideration. The Gartner Group reported a failure rate of 50% in 2001 and predicts similar rates through 2006. Other estimates of failure by the Butler Group and Greenberg are as high 70% (Krigsman, 2009).Besides we cannot be one hundred percent ensure that we can extract useful information from the past data. Once analysis process fails, the CRM system will become useless. Cost in the process is also hard to calculate. Technology costs, people costs, and process costs are highly dependent on the company and system of choice. This includes the cost of acquisition as well as the costs of ongoing management and future development of the system. An accurate ROI is difficult to calculate, but is an important consideration in making any decision to deploy a CRM (Gartner,2004).

4. Recommendations

Carnival Cruise Lines should develop CRM system. Then the past two-year data can be made good use of. Besides, the company must innovate for the future by developing distribution channels and revenue centers that respond to customer needs before the competition. I believe smartphone is a new distribution channels in the future. Like they can develop a specialized application and offer some discount if guests place the order on the smartphone.

Reference

Gabriele Piccoli. (2012). Information Systems for Managers: Text & Cases.

Krigsman, M. (August 3, 2009). CRM failure rates: 2001-2009. Tech Decision Maker. Retrieved from: www.zdnet.com.

Gartner, Inc. (2004) Justifying CRM Costs and Boosting Return on Investment. Gartner Strategic Planning Series. Retrieved from: www.slideshare.com.