Abstract:

Acme is a travel agency, which specializes in selling cruise holidays. Although the organization started out as a bricks and mortar business, today 60% of the business is obtained online, and with 40% of the trade coming through the traditional routes. The organization has been highly successful, and business is growing, but the company is facing some challenges. Although service levels are high, increasing levels of competition have impacted on the organization, and the repeat purchase rate was reduced from 50% to 19%. Furthermore, the cost of new customer acquisition has increased significantly, to $78 per customer. The organization wishes to increase repeat sales in order to support better profit levels, and reduce the challenges and costs associated with new customer acquisition. The implementation of a customer relationship management program (CRM) has been advocated as a way of covering, analyzing, and facilitating utilizing of information about customers to improve the customer relationships, and marketing knowledge. The expected duration of implementation is approximately four months; and if it is able to increase repeat purchases by only 10%, it would increase the revenues for the company in excess of $4 million in the first year.
Brief Company Background;

Acme is a local travel agency firm. Established in 1978, the firm started out selling only through the shop, attracting new customers with the use of local advertising, including newspapers and billboards. Today the firm still uses the physical shop but also has a good presence on the internet, with 40% of trade coming from the shop and 60% online. The travel agency specializes in selling cruise holidays, dealing with most of the cruise lines, such as Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Holland America and NCL, using their various online travel agency interfaces. The agency