ROI for a Customer Relationship Management Initiative at GST

In this case, students must calculate the return on investment (ROI) for analytic customer relationship management (CRM) enabled by an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The case is based upon a real-life consulting engagement with a major Fortune 100 telecommunications company. In this case the executive management team's strategic objective is to grow the customer base by 5 percent annually by customer acquisition. The internal rate of return (IRR) calculated from the data given in the case is over 800 percent for one year, and sensitivity analysis shows this is a robust projection suggesting it should be funded without question. However, the strategy of the firm is customer acquisition in an environment of high customer churn. As a result of these dynamics, the revenues and net income of the firm are actually decreasing by hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A better solution would realize that the executive team has the incorrect strategic objective. Customer acquisition is the wrong approach in an environment of high customer churn and executives should focus on customer retention and cross-sell and up-sell to high value customers. The case discussion therefore takes students beyond CRM ROI to focuses on the key strategic concepts of customer relationship management.