CRM PROJECT-1

CRM Practices in Flipkart

Submitted By: - Submitted To:-

Manish Mangtani Dr. Neha Singh
Twinkle Kesarwani
Manish Kumar Gupta
Kumar Utkarsh
Dhaval Pandya
Table of Contents

Sr. No. Content Page No.

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5
About Flipkart
Flipkart Private Limited is an Indian e-commerce company established in 2007. It started with a
primary focus on online book sales and soon, expanded to lifestyle products, electronics, home
essentials, and groceries. Today, Flipkart is the biggest online Indian marketplace competing
with the world leader Amazon.
Since 2010, the company has made several acquisitions including Letsbuy, Myntra, Jabong,
eBay India, etc. In addition to its main office in Bengaluru, Flipkart has branch offices in Delhi
and Mumbai. Apart from India, the firm is registered in Singapore. In 2018, the US-based retail
chain Walmart acquired a majority stake in Flipkart.
Recently, Flipkart has opened its R&D Centre in Israel. This is in line with its latest acquisition
of Israeli start-up Upstream Commerce. The center is run by talented engineers from across the
world.
Headquarters
 Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Key People:
 Kalyan Krishnamurthy – CEO
 Sachin Bansal & Binny Bansal – Founders
Logo:
 Flipkart uses a single alphabet ‘f’ in blue color on a yellow colored shopping bag. The
alphabet ‘f’ is accompanied by speed lines. It is meant to denote positive and quick
service.  The chosen colors signify imaginativeness, liveliness, and inclusivity. The name
‘Flipkart’ itself means 'Flipping things into kart'. Till now, the company has modified its
logo 5-6 times.
Revenue:
 US $6.1 billion (FY 2019)
Number of Employees:
 30,000
Official Website:
 www.flipkartcareers.com
What is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s
relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple:
Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers,
streamline processes, and improve profitability.
When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with
contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.
A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people —
including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with
them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and
additional services throughout the relationship.

Who is CRM For?

A CRM system gives everyone — from sales, customer service, business development,
recruiting, marketing, or any other line of business — a better way to manage the external
interactions and relationships that drive success. A CRM tool lets you store customer and
prospect contact information, identify sales opportunities, record service issues, and manage
marketing campaigns, all in one central location — and make information about every customer
interaction available to anyone at your company who might need it.
With visibility and easy access to data, it's easier to collaborate and increase productivity.
Everyone in your company can see how customers have been communicated with, what they’ve
bought, when they last purchased, what they paid, and so much more. CRM can help companies
of all sizes drive business growth, and it can be especially beneficial to a small business, where
teams often need to find ways to do more with less.
Why CRM at Flipkart?
Flipkart is a fast-growing company with several employees, partners, suppliers, and
distributors. The information entering the system is too huge to gather structure and
make sense of without proper technology integration such as ERP and CRM. CRM
helps manage customers, employees, suppliers, and other operational processes in the
following ways:

 Enables efficient gathering and pooling of customer orders, sales information,

delivery and shipping details, web traffic, and analytics in real-time through
internal and external channels.
 Helps control scaling of the company by allowing addition and tweaking of
requirements and resources as demand grows and shrinks.
 Automates processes by allowing repetitive processes to reiterate on their own
instead of manual handling of data.
 Decreases labor cost of processing the order by a huge amount due to
integration of the system.
 Reduces the need for additional manpower and resources to complete transactions.
 With automation, useful information can be derived and charted such as customer
churn rate, repeat customers, frequency of purchase, etc,
 Flipkart reaches out to its customers through several channels such as email,
customer care, chat support, etc and CRM enables thorough integration of all the
channels at the back end to deliver a quality consumer experience.
CRM at Flipkart
Strategic CRM
 Customer Management Orientation- Sachin and Binny Bansal are ardent believers
of customer service and have structured the company by heavily focusing on
consumers. The company philosophy echoes in their tagline “making better our service
promise”. The founders believe that huge discounts alone cannot sustain a successful
business and customer satisfaction and preferences need to be addressed to keep the
flame going. Flipkart has built itself on the core foundations of reliability, quickness,
credibility, variety, and quality.

Providing good customer service enables Flipkart to enjoy high levels of customer
satisfaction, generate repeat business and ensure positive word-of-mouth. Senior
management believes that as the retail sector evolves, customer satisfaction will be a
key driver of success for most brands and organizations.

Operational CRM
 SalesForce Automation-SFA is the application of technology to support regular
sales functions and includes tools that are employed by users to perform
administrative and other repetitive tasks. SFA transforms repetitive and routine manual
processes into automated processes, which helps sales reps operate more efficiently. For
example, applications such as quarterly automated sales reports and calendaring tools are
key elements of sales technology. The domain for SFA applications includes the attainment
and storage of information. SFA tools assist sales reps in formulating a
 professional sales encounter. Sales reps can remain in contact with distant customer’s
via-email and cellphones, thus reducing travel hours. They can also receive and manage
orders from customers in an easy, timely fashion. Additionally, applications like
calendaring and routing tables help sales reduce downtime and increase their production
during regular work hours.

 Service Automation- Service Automation aims at developing methods and tools

for enabling businesses to automate the value co-creation between consumers and
businesses (B2C), between businesses (B2B), and within businesses (internal
business functions).

The visionary goal is that for each service instance the ideal configuration
of resources necessary to deliver this service instance, (i.e. information,
people, technologies, organizations) is composed and (to the highest
possible degree) executed dynamically and in real-time.

More specifically, the following questions are addressed:

1. How can a semantic model of the business be developed?

2. How can a repository with semantically described business activities and services be
developed?

3. To what extent can plans, processes, and workflows for achieving business goals be
generated automatically?

4. How can businesses better coordinate their activities, more quickly adapting to
changing circumstances.
  Supply Chain Management/Vendor Relationship Management
The elements and aspects of supply chain management in an e-environment is as follows:
 Architecture of Internal operations-This consists of the management of organizational
processes, customer focus, employee management, and the development of a virtual
organization.
 Architecture of inter-organizational operations-This consist of the creation of a shared
vision between organizations, operations modeling between organizations, and process
modeling between organizations
 Architecture of inter-organizational technologies-This consists of integrating through
the creation of networks across organizations.
Analytical CRM
 Customer Knowledge Discovery- Flipkart has an amazing recommendation system in
place to make product discovery faster and seamless. The recommendation system used
by Flip Kart predicts users’ intent and helps connect them with products they need or
perhaps be interested in in an automated manner. They help users in the following ways :
 Help find: similar products.
Ex: recommendations to buy an Apple phone when surfing Nokia phones.
 Help decide.
Ex: people who viewed this ended up buying.
 Complete the purchase experience.
Ex: cases for phones, laptop bags, etc.
 Excite or wow.
Ex: New Chetan Bhagat novel etc.
 Customer Demographics Analysis and Customer Behavior Modelling- Flipkart’s
customers fall into the categories of youth, avid book readers, technology enthusiasts, and
online shoppers. Therefore, it has carefully demarcated and segmented each of the
demographic categories and modeled the customer behavior to understand their needs
and preferences. It creates data models from the following sources:
 Bought history
 Browse history
 Compare history
 Bought items
 Wish list items
 Rated products
 Cart additions
 Data Transformation- The Flipkart site is based on the LAMP architecture. LAMP
stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP and refers to a common way of designing
modern websites based on freely available and reliable open source technologies. The
LAMP architecture provides a cost-effective and reliable way to build websites. Using
LAMP components also helps in scaling the website back-end and integrating with ERP
(and CRM) capabilities. Flipkart is one of the best examples of companies that have used
the LAMP architecture to build and scale a highly profitable e-commerce system.

There are essentially four technology teams within Flipkart as an organization:

1. Website development and maintenance

2. Data Analytics/Business Analytics (Data mining and warehousing)
3. ERP (CRM comes here)
4. Platform Management (integrating sales force automation and managing
forward/backward integration with other technologies)

Ref: LinkedIn profiles of employees and list of opening on naukri.com

and Flipkart’s site: http://www.flipkart.com/s/careers

 Excerpt from Flipkart’s career site:

“This expansion has led us to hire talented professionals across departments like Website,
Business Planning and Analytics, ERP, Business Development, Product Management, and
Marketing, Supply- Chain Management and Customer Support.”

Website:

Flipkart defines its website management and development roles to achieve: Scalability:
Development must be scalable to accommodate more traffic and more orders
Availability/downtime: 0 downtimes, 100% availability for the enhanced end-user
experience.

Social Experience: Flipkart continues to design its website to provide opportunities for
customers to interact in a group and to tap this group behavior for more targeted results.

Analytics:

The analytics team is not only concerned with data mining and understanding consumer
buying preferences, but the analytics team engages in understanding vendor management,
supply chain management, and managing the lo, logistics. The team is involved in managing
different information systems and analyzing the data flowing through all these systems to
tweak and streamline the operations of the company. Some of the achievements of this team
include “2-day delivery process”, “money-back guarantee”, “hassle-free Just in Time
shipping” and “route optimization” for delivery boys. The team indulges in data mining,
data analytics, data warehousing, and predictive analysis.

ERP:

The core ERP system at Flipkart can be broken down into:

1. Procurement

2. Inventory Planning and Forecasting

3. Logistics: Self Delivery, accounting, invoicing, and customer management

4. CRM (Discussed in detail in the report)

5. Warehousing Management
Typically, Flipkart follows the classic CRM architecture as dictated by Goodhue et. al., MIS
quarterly executive, 2002. The technical team handling ERP implementation and operations
at Flipkart is cross-functional and the ERP system is the backbone of Flipkart’s operational
efficiency.

Platform:

The platform team is concerned with the overall maintenance and scaling of the e-commerce
platform. The team helps different business units at Flipkart understand the integration
process and helps the teams work in harmony. The platform team actively seeks new
technology adaptation for increasing the operational efficiency across the organization
without disturbing the existing stability of the system. Some of the new technologies that the
team is exploring include:

1. Cloud computing

2. Distributed computing

3. Data sources (Schema/Schema-less) and understanding service-oriented architecture.

Customer value assessment

Value assessment at Flipkart is done through various metrics such as:

 Click-through-rates
 Relevance/ quality.
 Visibility
 Click-to-order
 Quality
 Confidence
 A/B Framework

A.B framework is used to measure the success of web marketing programs as it allows
multiple versions of the site to be live simultaneously. Thus enabling the company to
conduct live experiments by drawing off a considerable l portion of traffic and analyzing the
results. Both components of measurements i.e. metrics and A/B work hand-in-hand. The
metrics tool exists in the form of a dashboard that measures the website’s performance on
various parameters. For example, if the transaction rate falls below a certain limit, systems
are immediately alerted. Whereas with A/B, engineers can rapidly implement their ideas.
"When someone proposes a new idea, a lot of precious time is spent debating what-if
scenarios. Now, we can implement an idea, while mitigating its risks."

Impact of CRM
 Through CRM initiatives, Flip kart has successfully garnered an audience strength of
7.4 million or 74 lakhs unique users every month growing at 431% annually.
 It has a strong customer base of 2.08 million as of the beginning of 2012.
 Its inventory model and strong customer relationship management have made it the
largest bookseller in both online and offline categories in India. Also, it is expanding
majorly to become India’s largest e-commerce platform.
 Through its efficient e-CRM implementation, Flip kart has website visits of 102
million
 Total Number of Repeat customers has been 70% of net consumers.
 The average order size has risen to Rs. 772 from Rs.300 in the past, with the bulk of
sales happening from the books category.
 The current margin Flipkart gains from its sales have gone up in various categories:
 Books: 20%
 Apparels: 30-40%
 Electronics-6-8%
 The outreach to the online user has scaled up to 11.5%
 The average revenue per customer is continually increasing with 35$ or rs.1855 a
figure reached in early 2012.
 The supply chain and distribution model has been majorly impacted by technology
integration with the delivery of products reaching a milestone of 20 products per
minute i.e. 1250 an hour and 30,000 items a day.
 With the increase in customer base and number of orders, the estimated % return of
goods has also gone up to 20-30%.
 No of employees has increased to approximately 5000.