Viewpoint: Never the twain shall meet

This study sought to establish Customer Relationship Management as a customer retention tool at OK Zimbabwe Limited in Bulawayo Metropolitan Province. The study investigated why organisations should care about existing customers and explored challenges on the implementation of Customer Relationship Management as a customer retention tool. The mixed research design was used to enable an in-depth qualitative establishment of Customer Relationship Management as a customer retention tool at OK Zimbabwe Limited. Convenient sampling and purposive sampling techniques were employed in the selection of a sample of 91 respondents out of a target population of 303 potential respondents. Open and closed ended questionnaires and interview schedules were employed for gathering data. Till operators responded to open ended questionnaires whilst customers responded to closed ended questionnaires through an online survey. Managers and marketing officers responded through guided interviews. Thematic analysis of data revealed that poor implementation of Customer Relationship Management concept contributed to the loss of market share, growth and profitability at OK Zimbabwe Limited in the Bulawayo Province. Till operators lack the basic knowledge about the purpose of CRM whilst managers had an idea theoretically but they lack application. The results further revealed that the absence of Customer Service Managers in all OK supermarkets in Bulawayo made it difficult for the branches to handle or manage customer issues at branch level. OK Zimbabwe Limited still lags behind in terms of technology and relies on manual documents. The study recommends that OK Zimbabwe Limited sources enough resources such as new machines, operates normal working hours for all employees, network management, provides training facilities for all employees including managers, decentralisation of procurement, maintenance, decentralises information and technology department into Southern and Northern regions to reduce workload at head office. It is further recommended that all OK Zimbabwe Limited supermarkets in Bulawayo should have Customer Service Managers as custodians of Customer Relationship Management at branch level and the Marketing Department should be operational in Bulawayo.

Conflict between Engineers and Marketers: The Engineer’s Perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explain the development of an interactive geographic and demographic information mapping and management system to support the Engineering, Marketing and Business Research Departments.

This study's goal was to determine how business data analytics strategies affected the performance of banks in the Ndola district's banking sector. A descriptive research design was used with banks in the banking industry which served as the study's target demographic. To ensure that every bank in the population had an equal chance of being chosen, stratified and purposeful sampling was used. 50 employees were selected on purpose as the study's sample size. A questionnaire was used as a primary data gathering tool and was given to employees from at least 5 different departments, particularly in Information Technology, Finance, Operations, Marketing and Customer Service departments. The survey responses were reviewed and divided into a number of categories to make it easier to use descriptive statistics for analysis. The information collected from respondents was summarized using frequency distribution tables. To make the data easier to interpret and study, it was presented as frequency distribution tables, pie charts, and bar charts and in addition data narration was also used. The study found that banks in Ndola City's banking industry used reasonable data analytics techniques and tools to aid them in maintain and attaining a competitive advantage, as well as mitigate financial risk and enhance customer experience. The research also showed that banks encountered many difficulties in the usage of business data analytics which includes organizational culture, human resource expertize, High Data Volume and Velocity, Support from top management, Customer trust and Transparency, Data Security and privacy. If performance of their banks were to remain competitive, the study advises banks in in Ndola District and other companies to implement good business data analytics practices. They should constantly make sure that the process is as inclusive as feasible while implementing data analytics practices. According to the study, commercial banks in Zambia's Ndola district should focus on business data analytics to identify patterns and correlations, improve resource management, and reduce bank hall congestion. The report also suggests that in order for Zambia's listed commercial banks to benefit as much as possible from business analytics technology, they should invest in the appropriate data analytics tools and enable their employees to use them and take appropriate action based on the knowledge they acquire.

We model how Internet Service Providers design tier rates, tier prices, and network capacity. Web browsing and video streaming are considered as the two dominant Internet applications. We propose a novel set of utility functions that depend on a user's willingness to pay for each application, the performance of each application, and the time devoted to each application. For a monopoly provider, the demand function for each tier is derived as a function of tier price and performance. We first give conditions for the tier rates, tier prices, and network capacity that maximize Internet Service Provider profit, defined as subscription revenue minus capacity cost. We then show how an Internet Service Provider may simplify tier and capacity design, by allowing their engineering department to set network capacity, their marketing department to set tier prices, and both to jointly set tier rates. Numerical results are presented to illustrate the magnitude of the decrease in profit resulting from such a simplified design.