Evergreen Investments: Mobile Crm

Evergreen Investments: Mobile CRM

What do you think Evergreen wants to achieve with its CRM?

Evergreen was one of the America’s 25 largest mutual fund companies and as such the industry was crowded and highly competitive. There was an intense rivalry in terms of number of mutual funds and even highly targeted funds fought for “shelf space” or advantageous placement to prospective customers. So marketing was the critical success factor for any firm in this industry. Further, it being a service industry rather than a manufacturing industry, the role of marketing and customer-relationship becomes all the more important. With CRM, Evergreen wanted to have comprehensive customer information to tailor its service, sales pitch, presentation etc so as to strengthened its client-relationship. There was customer-information collection, maintenance and analysis post every interaction with the client which helped Evergreen employees to carry out CRM activities. Further with wireless technologies, Evergreen aimed at transmission of live customer feeds and thus gain better insights and provide better service. Thus, with CRM, Evergreen is trying to achieve competitive advantage in its industry.

Is Irwin's approach (getting everything ready and then informing the users) a good one? Comment.

I don’t think this approach is a good one. The best approach would have been to involve the wholesalers into the decision-making process as the wholesalers are the ones who are the end-users of mobile CRM. It is clear that the wholesalers are not satisfied with the current CRM system as they found it quite time-consuming and cumbersome. Probably, they themselves have good idea of how to change the system and Irwin should try to sink in their recommendations as well. With Irwin’s approach, some of the employees may trust or just get frustrated as normally happens