Reflections Week Nine: The Harrah Case Study

This weeks online lecture was a question aboout what would happen if the casino Harrah failed to scrub and clean its CRM data. Here's my response:

If Harrah's fails to clean or scrub its CRM data, it will without doubt influence the way their customer representatives are able to customize the service to its casino guests. Moreover, since this type of customization is its key competitive advantage, this might be disastrous to the casino and the way it conducts its business, which again could have big consequences. Customers might not get the actual value of the Total Rewards program if they are registered more than once in the database. Also, if there is to be double registrations Harrash would not collect the correct data on its customers, and therefore not be able to suggest the correct offers to its guests, or market itself in the best possible way. This being said, I do not believe that any company is ever able to keep its database clean and flawless. I know from personal experience how difficult this is. I used to work for a company that developed and sold ERP and CRM systems to small and medium sized business, and for CRM purposes we of course used our own ERP system. However, even though this was our own software and we had more than fifty developers continuously working on the software and 100 supporters supporting the software, we would have many double registrations in our CRM database. I worked in sales for a period of time, and the implications of the many double registrations were that it often took a lot if time to look up customers in the database when they called in. The result of this was of course increased waiting time and bad service, which was hard to explain taking into consideration that this software was our own. Also, it made it harder to convince people to buy the software since it obviously wasn’t working very well! However, usually incomplete and inaccurate information are due to human error.