Carnival Cruise Line

The IT improvement will help CCL to achieve the future goal that attract more loyal customer, help CCL to arrange customized activities, lower inventory cost and attract more first timers and repeaters by cooperating with travel agencies to promote their product. Provide Fun ship service with low cost and customer friendly strategy Carnival is a low-cost and customer oriented company which provides fun for a broad market. (Exhibit1 illustrates the core competiveness and key activities of CCL. ) â€Å"Fun Ship† theme is the key competitive advantage of CCL which â€Å"wants to think of the boat as the destination, and the ports as secondary†.At the same time, they use various promotional channels and wide ticket price range to attract broader market. Low cost strategy, customer friendly service and efficient product distribution enable CCL to be the leading company in the cruise industry. CCL performed well in the past and boasts bright future market, but there is still a large room of strategic improvement to break the bottleneck and achieve an even stronger market position. Recommend an IT investment in cruiser behavior analysis system Make an investment in developing a Cruiser Behavior Estimation system will optimize the current CRM system.In analysis of the current CRM system (Exhibit 2 virtualizes the process of current CRM system), I find that CCL has already embraced a comprehensive IS and the FSS perfectly create a cashless society on board with the SS card, but they don’t take full advantage of cruiser activity data. In the Exhibit 2, we can find that CCL don’t have any further estimation of the customer behavior. I improve the CRM process by adding a cruiser behavior estimation process, numbered as process 8 in the DFD (Exhibit3). With the process, the aligned CRM will improve customer service and create business value in four aspects.Raise customer satisfaction with the Behavior analysis system The newly added cruiser behavior estimation system will enable CCL to make quick response and give provide diversified activity recommendation. (Exhibit 3 presents my proposed IT-enabled process improvement and the aligned process numbered as a). After the analysis of the cruiser activities data, CCL can estimate that preference of on-board cruisers and make the personalized activity recommendations to encourage continuing shopping in the following days on board, which is similar to the â€Å"Amazon Recommendation for you†.The system will also help â€Å"Cruise staff quick learns guests’ name and preference. † Information from the system lower the inventory cost The customer pref erence and actual on-board consumption information will be recorded in customer database and used to predict their future consumption of inventory. (Exhibit 3 process b)The system will use the data to estimate the customers’ demand in the following days. Then the inventory center uses the estimation to adjust their supply. Therefore, the action will definitely save money for CCL with accurate inventory supply.Evaluate the customer loyalty with the system The evaluation results of customer loyalty will serve for further marketing promotion. (Exhibit 3 process c)Many customer behaviors will act as an evident to predict the potential customers. For instance, the most first timer wants to try some brand new activities, while the repeater prefers to more enjoyable experience. With the data analysis, they can predict the potential repeaters and send the information to PVPs to make the further promotion. Enhance the corporation with travel agency