Headquarters Air Force Material Command Customer Relationship Management Study

Because of the lack of product and price differentiation, many organizations consider Customer Relationship Management (CRM) their primary focus. CRM uses information about each customer to make each customer more valuable to the organization, and the organization more valuable to the customer, while decreasing the cost of servicing the customer. However, an organization cannot conform to customer specifications if the needs of the customers as well as what the customer values is not known. As a result, Headquarters (HQ) Air Force Material Command (AFMC) is taking the initiative to gain an understanding of their customers. The purpose of this study is two-fold; the first is to identify HQ AFMC's internal and external customers and secondly, segment these customers based on significant organizational characteristics. This thesis also looks at the approaches private and public sector organizations have taken to segment their customers and discusses possible ways in which HQ AFMC can use segmentation to develop or improve a CRM strategy to more effectively communicate with customers and ultimately improve operational efficiency, decrease costs and improve customer satisfaction. Conducting archival analysis on customer requisition records from HQ AFMC Air Logistic Center (ALC) Customer Service Centers (CSC) is used to reveal HQ AFMC customers. A Recency, Frequency, Location (RFL) model was developed and implemented for the purpose of segmenting HQ AFMC customers.