Making Choices

In the presentation by Malcolm Gladwell about The Paradox of Choice, it stimulates the thoughts of whether should we strive for more options or limiting the variation of a product. Essentially, this comes to the question of to what extend can increasing in choices increase the general welfare of the society.

Customer relationship management is the fundamental in trying to increase the welfare of the customer in order to earn the customer's loyalty. So it make sense that making the correct choice to varies a particular product to serve different segments of the market. However, making the correct choice is hard because of the capability of the technologies.

Lets step backward and looks at the theory that Gladwell presented. He said that by providing more choices, the customer will have a decrease in terms of economic utility. However, limiting choices have the same consequences. This is exactly what the idioms have said ages ago.

|The grass is always greener on the other side

This basically pointed out that regardless what the manufacturer decides to do, it will have contradicting consequences. Ultimately, the perfect choice will lies between the line. It means that the correct choice will be choice optimisation. By optimisation, I mean that will be depends on how the manufacturer thinks the market can be segmented and how it can be best served.

However, from the customer perspective, whenever they are making a purchase, it is about making decision. Making good decision are usually decision that are not biased. However, by limiting the choices that a customer can make, it sort of placing a biased contraints on the customer to make a good decision. In contrast, allowing free flow of choices will overwhelmed the customer will options that they might not be able to digest in time to make a wise decision. This also reflects on the thought that MICROSOFT DATA WAREHOUSING philosophy of providing managers with a report that will not overwhelmed the decision maker. However, this approach will be a biased approach because it will depends on how the developer select the information that should be available to the manager instead of the manager seeks the relevant information in the data warehouse.

In conclusion, my point of view in terms of CRM and making variation to a product to serve the society, CRM can play the center role in defining and optimising the choices that should be available. As always, the best outcome will be a balance outcome because no one likes extremism. It means limiting option to singular or making options to a very huge amount will both have bad consequences.