电子商务中的客户关系管理留学生dissertation

随着管理学和营销学理念的飞速发展，客户关系已经成为企业界和学术界共同关注的热点，并开始广泛应用于各行各业。进入二十一世纪后，电子商务得到了迅速的发展。而电子商务环境下的客户关系管理为电子商务的又快又好发展提供了坚实的基础。本文分析了客户关系管理在电子商务环境下被赋予了新的内涵， 从不同的方面对电子商务和客户关系管理的融合做了详细说明。其中客户关系管理中的客户细分，客户保持及客户忠诚度对电子商务企业有着非常重要的影响。这些也充分证明了“以客户为中心”的重要性。最后通过戴尔公司的案例对上述理论进行了探讨。
 
为了更好的利用和帮助理解，我们现在需要介绍几个基本的概念，这些项目涵盖电子商务和客户关系管理领域，帮助你顺利的阅读dissertation。 Abstract
 
With the rapid development of management and marketing concept, customer relationship has become the focus of the business community and academia and has been widely used in various industries. In the 21st century, e-commerce has been developing rapidly. At the same time, customer relationship management in the era of e-commerce provides a solid foundation for the rapid and healthy development of e-commerce. This paper analyzes the customer relationship management in e-commerce era which has been given a new meaning and a detailed description of the integration of e-commerce and customer relationship management from different aspects. In addition, I will also recommend that customer segmentation, customer retention and customer loyalty in the CRM have a very significant impact to e-commerce businesses, which has fully proved the importance of “customer-centric”. Finally, Dell’s case is used to discuss the above theories.
 
Contents
 
Abstract............................................................................................................................................ I
 
摘要................................................................................................................................................ II
 
1 Introduction of E-commerce and CRM....................................................................................... 1
 
1.1 The basic concepts of CRM............................................................................................... 1#p#分页标题#e#
 
1.1.1 The definition of CRM............................................................................................. 1
 
1.1.2 The idea of CRM .................................................................................................... 1
 
1.2 The basic concepts of e-commerce..................................................................................... 2
 
1.2.1 The definition of e-commerce.................................................................................. 2
 
1.2.2 The development of e-commerce............................................................................. 2
 
1.3 The relationship between E-commerce and CRM.............................................................. 3
 
1.3.1 The applications of CRM in E-commerce................................................................ 3
 
1.3.2 The function of CRM to E-commerce enterprises .................................................. 3
 
2 Customer segmentation in the era of CRM.................................................................................. 4
 
2.1 Customer segment overview.............................................................................................. 4
 
2.1.1 The basic concepts of customer segmentation.......................................................... 4
 
2.1.2 The ideal customer segmentation............................................................................. 5
 
2.2 Changes and characteristics of customer segmentation in the era of E-commerce............ 5
 
2.2.1 Customer segmentation index.................................................................................. 5
 
2.2.2 The changing of customer segmentation index........................................................ 6
 
3 Customer retention and customer loyalty in the era of e-commerce............................................ 7
 
3.1 The introduction of customer retention.............................................................................. 7
 
3.1.1 The basic concept of customer retention.................................................................. 7
 
3.1.2 The subject of the customer retention...................................................................... 7
 
3.1.3 The ways to improve customer retention ................................................................ 7
 
3.2 The introduction of customer loyalty................................................................................. 8
 
3.2.1 The definition of customer loyalty........................................................................... 8
 
3.2.2 The ways to improve customer loyalty ................................................................... 8#p#分页标题#e#
 
4 Case analysis---DELL.................................................................................................................. 9
 
4.1 Dell made a reasonable division of the market ................................................................. 9
 
4.2 How Dell is to increase its own customer loyalty............................................................. 11
 
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................... 12
 
References..................................................................................................................................... 13
 
Acknowledgement........................................................................................................................ 14
 
As for companies, customer relationship management is an old but creative topic. As an old topic, in fact, since there start commercial activities, the customer relationship has been the core issue in the business activities and one of the key to the success of business activities. As a creative topic, the customer relationship is the great information resources in the age of electronic commerce business activities for companies. Meanwhile, the information needed by all business activities is almost originated from CRM. So, in the trend of globalization, CRM has become the core of enterprise information technology and management techniques.
 
CRM has come a long way in a few short years. Today, CRM is the central customer repository for all things. In our age of the distributed workforce, going to the backroom to pull the customer’s file from the cabinet is not practical. Further, as multiple people from departments all over your company have the need for direct interaction with the customer, this central customer record is critical. More complex then a rolodex or contact manager, CRM is enabling businesses of all sizes to be more efficient and predictable. What’s more, more thoughtful service can be provided for their customers.
 
1 Introduction of E-commerce and CRM
 
For better comprehension and availability, we now need to introduce a great multitude of basic concepts. These items cover the field of e-commerce and CRM to assist you to smooth the reading of the thesis.
 
1.1 The basic concepts of CRM
 
From the perspective of company’s strategy and competitiveness, CRM means to enhance customer satisfaction and perceived value, to build long-term customer relationship and to expand company’s intangible assets attached to the customer relationship network by the interactive business process in CRM. In addition, by providing effective decision-making information for the related business processes and improving the efficiency of business processes and the degree of integration, CRM can also guarantee favorable market position and sustainable competitive advantage.#p#分页标题#e#
 
1.1.1 The definition of CRM
 
CRM has three meanings: modern management concepts; innovative enterprise management mode and operation mechanism; the collection of IT business management, integrated management of hardware and software systems and applications solutions.
 
1.1.2 The idea of CRM
 

 
To obtain profit by maximizing customer utility—collection, analysis and use of customer information[1]
 
1.2 The basic concepts of e-commerce
 
In the age of the global economy, customers want to buy your product or service when it is convenient for them. The need to have rich descriptions, images and details about your products online is driven by customer demand. That demand is only in the half of the battle, the customer then wants to be able to instantly purchase that product and of course, get it right away, after all your competitor can offer that to them. Today’s e-Commerce solutions have graduated to a level far beyond a simple shopping cart. Customers want the ability to manage all aspects of the purchase and their relationship with you through this means. Perhaps most important to this phenomenon is the experience the customer receives after the order confirmation is complete. Order execution to the customer and if necessary back to you, must be simple, quick and seamless
 
1.2.1 The definition of e-commerce
 
The buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers through an electronic medium, without using any paper documents. E-commerce is widely considered to be the buying and selling of products over the internet, and any transaction that is completed through electronic measures can be considered e-commerce. E-commerce is subdivided into three categories: business to business or B2B (Cisco), business to consumer or B2C (Amazon), and consumer to consumer or C2C (eBay) also called electronic commerce. [2]
 
1.2.2 The development of e-commerce
 
E-commerce originated in a standard for the exchange of documents during the 1948.4.9 Berlin blockade and airlift. Various industries elaborated upon the system until the first general standard was published in 1975. The electronic data interchange (EDI) standard is unambiguous, independent of any particular machine, and flexible enough to handle most simple electronic transactions. What’s more, the standard forms for business-to-business transactions, e-commerce encompasses much wider activity for example, the deployment of secure private networks (intranets) for sharing information within a company, as well as selective extensions of a company's intranet to collaborating business networks (extranets). A new form of cooperation known as a virtual company, actually a network of firms, each performing some of the processes needed to manufacture a product or to deliver a service, has flourished.#p#分页标题#e#
 
1.3 The relationship between e-commerce and CRM
 
Customer relationship management is of great importance in the environment of e-commerce. The integration of these two attributes a lot to the enterprises’ profits.
 
1.3.1 The applications of CRM in e-commerce
 
In the era of E-commerce, advanced customer relationship management system gradually began to use the Internet tools and platforms, manage a variety of online customer relationships and channel relationships accurately and support the development of electronic commerce strategy. Consequently, new connotation was given to CRM, they are:
 
First, by using CRM to fully integrate enterprise business processed and marketing, expand their markets and marketing channels to deal effectively with customer relationships and retain more customers,
 
Second, CRM is not only the marketing and service departments when facing customers, but also an automated work platform for every department sharing information and resources to mine, coordinate corporate resource and to expand the living space as well as potential.
 
Third, CRM is the cyclic process of work—transforming customer information into a positive customer relationship. It also can help to collect, analyze and research customer information truly and comprehensively to provide multi-angle services.
 
1.3.2 The function of CRM to e-commerce enterprises
 
1) Provide personalized service for customers
 
The CRM in the era of E-commerce focuses on effective and real-time interaction between enterprises and customers, which means that in the concept of “customer centric”, CRM can maintain existing customers and discover new customers at the same time through the network by using large databases to manage customer information, using data mining and data warehouse technology to intelligently analyze vast amounts of customer data and business data. In accordance with customer needs, CRM can provide personalized products and services in a timely manner. Take amazon.com for an instance, its CRM system can analyze every customer’s raw data and transaction history, and then deduce his assumption habits, consumer psychology, consumption level and customer loyalty as well as the potential value. At last, you can introduce his wanted books. Only in this way, can company own more loyal customers. [3]
 
2) Screen out the correct customer base
 
Although enterprise’s market and profit have great connection with network interaction ability, not all the companies need to conduct E-commerce activities with every customer. According to the 80/20 Rule, 20% of the customer (the most valuable customers) create 80% of the company’s profit, whereas half of which is lost by the 20% no-profitable customer. Therefore, company can identify the most valuable customers through the implication of CRM, such as some VIP customers. Such reputable customers can be acknowledged as the God. The company should give them the optimal treatment, promote their impression of company and maintain their desire to purchase in order to guarantee company continuous profit.#p#分页标题#e#
 
As CRM is of great importance to the sustainable development of company, I will elaborate it from the following three aspects below: customer segmentation, customer retention and customer loyalty.
 
2. Customer segmentation in the era of CRM
 
Due to the two-way network, direct and interactive characteristics, customers in the era of e-commerce have great difference with the customers in the traditional era: a sudden increase in the number of customer contacting with the company and the explosive growth of the customer data; suddenly expansive customer choice, reduction of customer loyalty; personalized customer demand; mature customer experience; high standard customer requirements, etc, all challenge the traditional marketing strategy and customer concepts largely. In such an era, to take effective method to segment customers; to identify customer accurately; to distinguish different customers in the customer base; to divide customers into different classes or types; to allocate the limited resources of company rationally by the awareness of the customer value have special significance to the e-commerce company.
 
2.1 Customer segment overview
 
For businesses, different customers have different intrinsic value. Customer relationship management refers to a process of obtaining, maintaining and increasing profitable customers, whose prior problem is to take effective method to segment customers and to find the intrinsic value of high customer to improve company’s profitable ability.
 
2.1.1 The basic concepts of customer segmentation
 
In the mid-1950s, American scientist, Wendell R. Smith, firstly came up with the segmentation concept. Subdivision, also known as customer segmentation, refers to the process that the market is divided into different buyers with different needs, characteristics or behaviors. [4] There are also others saying that Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups of individuals that are similar in specific ways relevant to marketing, such as age, gender, interests, spending habits, and so on. Using segmentation allows companies to target groups effectively, and allocate marketing resources to best effect. According to an article by Jill Griffin for Cisco Systems, traditional segmentation focuses on identifying customer groups based on demographics and attributes such as attitude and psychological profiles. Value-based segmentation, on the other hand, looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them.
 
Customer segmentation procedures include: deciding what data will be collected and how it will be gathered; collecting data and integrating data from various sources; developing methods of data analysis for segmentation; establishing effective communication among relevant business units (such as marketing and customer service) about the segmentation; and implementing applications to effectively deal with the data and respond to the information it provides.#p#分页标题#e#
 
Customer segmentation is of great significance to the effective implementation of CRM for enterprises and to improve corporate profits. Make use of the company’s limited resources rationally. Identify potential customers, to act with a well-defined objective in mind
 
2.1.2 The ideal customer segmentation
 
An ideal market segment should satisfy all of the following criteria: It is internally homogeneous (potential customers in the same segment choose the same product qualities); it is externally heterogeneous (potential customers from different segments have basically different quality preferences); it responds similarly to a market stimulus; it can be easily reached by market intervention without much cost.
 
When customers with the same product and/or service needs are divided up into groups so they can be charged different amounts for the services, the term segmentation is also used
 
A customer is allocated to one market segment by the customers’ individual characteristics. Often cluster analysis and other statistical methods are used to check out those characteristics, which lead to internally homogeneous and externally heterogeneous market segments.
 
Standards of characteristics used for segmentation: Gender; Price; Interests Location; Religion; Income; Size of Household.
 
While there may be theoretically 'ideal' market segments, in reality every organization engaged in a market will develop different ways of imagining market segments, and create product differentiation strategies to exploit these segments. A firm a temporary commercial advantage can be given by the market segmentation as well as corresponding product differentiation strategy.
 
2.2 Changes and characteristics of customer segmentation in the era of E-commerce
 
2.2.1 Customer segmentation index
 
Specifically, the indicators and variables frequently used in the practice of customer segmentation can be divided into seven categories: demographic and social factors, graphical area factors, psychological factors, customer interest, behavioral factors, product and service factors and customer value. From the perspective of customer, it can be concluded as the basic characteristics of customer, the psychological characteristics of the customers, the behavioral characteristics of customer and the relationship between customer and enterprise.
 
1) The basic characteristics of customer
 

 
Demographic factorsDemographic factor means to divide the market into different groups according to demographic variables, such as age, family size, family life cycle, gender, income, occupation, etc.
 
2)customer’s psychological characteristics
 
#p#分页标题#e#
 
3) Behavior characteristics
 
Buyers are divided into groups based on their knowledge, attitudes, uses, or responses to a product. Many marketers believe that behavior variables are the best starting point for building market segments.
 
2.2.2 The changing of customer segmentation index
 
However, for today’s enterprise in the e-commerce era, the four segmentation indexes---customers’ basic characteristics, customers’ psychological characteristics, customer behavior characteristics and customer and corporate relations characteristics will reflect the different characteristics and flaws. Like many old traditional segmentation methods, many special, reflecting real-time customer and the dynamic behaviors of the data in network platform are not taken into consideration. Therefore, in the era of e-commerce, broadening the traditional factors and solving problems in accordance with customer value and customer behavior characteristics are the most practical and the most suitable way. Customer value as the core: There is an important principle--Pareto method, namely 80% of the company’ profit is created by the 20% of the customers. Chose dynamic index:
 
Market environment is constantly changing. As for companies, they must treat their customers in a dynamic and development vision. Even for the same customers, their value is constantly changing.
 
3 Customer retention and customer loyalty in the era of e-commerce
 
3.1 The introduction of customer retention
 
Customer is the most important virtual assets or potential assets for company. A company’ competitive advantage is determined by its management of existing assets. Especially in the network economy, the special e-commerce environment, the shorter distance among company, customer and competitor as well as the transparent market make the customer easily loss and change. Therefore, research on customer retention causes extensive interest in academic field. Many enterprises have aware the importance of customer retention and implemented the customer retention strategy. Consequently, customer retention has become one of the objectives for company’s CRM implementation.
 
3.1.1 The basic concept of customer retention
 
Customer retention refers to that the suppliers maintain the established customer relationships (from the prospective of suppliers, customer relation refers to the bushiness relationship between supplier and customer) and attract customer to purchase product and service constantly.
 
3.1.2 The subject of the customer retention
 
The subject of the customer retention is the existing customers. Customer group owned by a company is a dynamically changed customer collection, which can be explained by Leaky Bucket Model: At the time when a company attracts more customers by his own marketing effort, a part of customer may be lost because of demand changes and competitor’s attraction. Although enterprise’s customer volume may be increased by acquiring new customers, a better management and keeping existing customers can help corporate increase more profits and reduce costs.#p#分页标题#e#
 
3.1.3 The ways to improve customer retention
 
1) Improve customer "stimulation." Discounting, promotions and active sales efforts can be used to deepen the existing customer relationships and entice them to purchase more products. In addition, increasing investments in education, training as well as marketing your products to individuals at a customer site can help to increase usage, further deepening the relationship.
 
2)"Red flag" high-risk customers and respond quickly to retain them. Build a process in the organization to actively monitor customers for the early warning signs of attrition – such as decreased usage or an increase in customer service calls. Develop specific campaign strategies to retain the most attractive ones.
 
3) Elaborate the key sources of customer dissatisfaction. Improving the accuracy and clarity of your billing processes can go a long way toward minimizing customer dissatisfaction. Increasing the power of the service organization and the sales team to deal with customer complaints promptly and offer retention-oriented promotions are other ways to appease dissatisfied customers.
 
4) Resist price reduction pressure among existing customers. Slow down your discounting as much as possible to improve margins while minimizing attrition.
 
5) Focus customer investment in low-attrition segments. Rearrange your field sales incentives to reward acquisitions of customers in key segments that exhibit the most "stickiness." Within six months of acquisition, customers typically exhibit behaviors that clearly indicate how valuable they will be as ongoing customers. Use those signs to take initiative to focus on retaining the most attractive customers, long before they might consider leaving. [5]
 
3.2 The introduction of customer loyalty
 
3.2.1 The definition of customer loyalty
 
"Customer loyalty is that when an organization receives the ultimate reward for the way it interacts with its customers. Loyal customers buy more, buy longer and tell more people - that's true customer loyalty." [6]
 
3.2.2 The ways to improve customer loyalty
 
1) Thank customers who are doing business with you. The value of the product or service will determine the transaction means. High cost service deals guarantee a handwritten note; even smaller cost transaction companies can send pre-printed appreciation notes to customers on a scheduled basis.
 
2) Stay in contact with existing and past clients on a consistent basis. By not forgetting them, they won’t forget you. Not only use phone calls, note cards or postcards, newsletters, and email but also consider opportunities for personal contact, a good idea in our high-tech, low-touch world.
 
3) Give the customers more than they expect. Take into consideration about what the customer have not realized. Delivering more than they expect is one of the most powerful ways to gain customer loyalty.#p#分页标题#e#
 
4) Listen and ask. Take time to carefully listen to what your customers say, and if they don’t offer volunteer information—ask for it.
 
5) Pay attention to the politeness and your manners. Remenber to use please and thank you. Be on time for meetings.
 
6) Make realistic promises—and to be consistent. It is far better to promise something in a week and deliver in three days than the other way around.
 
7) Share information and give references to the clients. Send valuable and interesting information to a client. Always look for ways to help customers learn. Let the clients know that you are doing it.
 
8) Explain how things work. Sell a product and show how to use it. If you sell a service, explain what the customer can do to maximize its value. [7]
 
9) Have fun! Really enjoy your customers, build long term relationships, and look upon them as your extended family. What’s more, show your appreciation by treating a customer with something fun. Make full of your imagination! You can spare no effort to make your customers happy, and all the extra effort will increase customer loyalty for you. Make it a habit to conscientiously view your clients as the most important asset that you have. That is because no customers, no businesses!
 
4. Case analysis---DELL
 
In these e-commerce implementation enterprises, U.S. DELL Company developed marketing strategy by making use of Internet to learn the specific needs of customers. Selling computers and related products through direct sales business model eventually gave rise to the revolution of the PC business model, achieving great success. Nowadays, a lot of companies are to follow suits and their ultimate goal is only one: Access to customer loyalty. The chairman of DELL, Michael Dell, has ever said, “Alliance with the customer is our greatest advantage.” Therefore, we explore how to implement customer relationship management in the e-commerce era from the analysis of Dell’s success stories.
 
4.1 Dell made a reasonable division of the market
 

 
1) Striving to each purchase of small business; Try to avoid the new transactions, especially those who lack the technical support department’s individual consumers possessed by the large company
 
2) Focus on fighting for the relational customers---25% of the Fortune 500 companies; 10% of the followed by 5000 large companies; 8% of the 15000 enterprises with 200-2---employees
 
3) Develop a series of value-added services. For example, Dellplus provides commercial and proprietary software and Dellware provides one-stop sales and service with a full range of hardware and software products. Large customer service is outsourced to a third party service providers like digital equipment corporation who has nearly 20,000 field service personnel.#p#分页标题#e#
 
4) Make efforts to expand its customer’s scale economic advantage. 10%-15% price advantage acquired through direct sales model is used to win new customers and deepen the relationship with existing customers.
 
Another feature of Dell’ operational turnover efficiency is the ability to generate cash flow from the order. Relational customer: Payments are mainly through a company purchase order, credit card or tenancy agreement; payment cycle is significantly longer; generally speaking, in the relational customer market, the greater the number of each transaction, the higher the gross profit. Transactional customers can select the available credit card payment and cash on delivery: Dell can obtain payment within 24 hours after the sale by processing credit card and electronic payment. While Compaq Computer Corp., mainly through brokers’ sales, needs 35 days; Gateway Corp. needs 16.4 days. From the above analysis, we can learn that Dell has made a complete segmentation for its customers, under whom he knows what the customer needs, what kind of way can provide customers with a convenient and fast service just to make sure the “customer centric”
 
4.2 How Dell is to increase its own customer loyalty
 
Many of our enterprises have realized e-commerce and set up their own site but with no perfect outcome. The problem is that they only regard network technology as a means of reducing costs and use web publishing their own products not make it a carrier between business and customer communication. The main goal of setting up business websites is to make use of network to build close connections with customers. Although Internet is a survival platform for customer relationship, powerful back-end database support is needed to realize one-to-one marketing increasing customer loyalty.
 
1) Put customer information into a database
 
The core idea of CRM system is “customer centric”. In order to achieve such a purpose, it is necessary to be able to accurately grasp the needs of customers, provide personalized service and offer necessary and timely customer care. Therefore, the key of every CRM system is to establish a centralized and unified database of customer information to effectively manage customer data. The database is the central repository of all the information of the enterprise and its customer relationship which records all of the information of the contacting customer and company including not only customer’s purchase transaction, telephone, evaluation, returns, service calls, and even the customer dissatisfaction but also some information the company takes initiative to contact, such as promotion advantage, letters, telephone, and individual interviews. In addition, the database also records all other customer information, like age and income, etc. For the enterprise’s customers, records of the database also include the number of employees and income levels. A good database can provide various functions for the company’s production business activities and the implementation of CRM is closely related to the quality of customer information database. [9]#p#分页标题#e#
 
2) To analyze the database to meet customer’s needs
 
When the data is input to the database, the next step is to make them to maximize the value. In this regard, the most important thing is to put the data in the user’s “hand” so that they can quickly and easily get the relevant data. Each department, like customer service, telemarketing and other departments, who get into the customer relationship management system should be easy to get to the data they want. Then using psychology, customer psychology, statistics, market research and other knowledge to deal with statistical analysis of customer data, customer’s purchasing behavior characteristics can be obtained, with which we can adjust the company’s business strategy, marketing strategy and making the entire business activities more effective. The user who can bring benefits can be provided with more services as well as a number of other things to attract them to continue as their customers. For those who can not bring benefits to users and even steal their trade secrets, services are not provided for them or provide them with fee-based services. These measures can enable enterprises to maintain a good relationship with the customer. Dell has achieved a great success just because of its use of its powerful database to provide customers with excellent after-sales service and technical supports.
 
Conclusion
 
In short, the relationship between businesses and customers is always in flux, so the customer relationship management theory is also in the process of constant development, improvement and enrichment. In today’s electronic commerce age, CRM has been given a new layer of meaning—CRM in the e-commerce environment is the true meaning of CRM. At the same time, the implementation of CRM also promotes e-commerce to develop more rapidly. From the case, Dell Company, we can learn that first, Dell has made a complete segmentation of the market: transactional model, relational model and hybrid; second, Dell has made a database which includes customer’s age, gender, occupation, and income etc. All the information about customer can help us to know what the customer needs and what kind of way can provide customers with a convenient and fast service.
 
With the development of e-commerce, information and new knowledge provided by the customer relationship management in the environment of e-commerce will be the control information resources for e-commerce activities, thus becoming the basic driving force to encourage enterprises to take off.
 
References
 
[1] [8] [9] 陈月波，电子商务概论，北京交通大学出版社，北京：2004
 
[2] http://www.investorwords.com/1637/e_commerce.html
 
[3] 陈显中　张　健　中共河北省委党校 电子商务环境下的企业客户关系管理研究 《商场现代化》2007 年8 月(下旬刊)总第513 期#p#分页标题#e#
 
[4] Philip Kotler, Gary Armstrong, Principles of Marketing 10/e[M], Tsinghua University Press, Beijing: 2001
 
[5] Karl Stark and Bill Stewart Dec 6, 2011
 
http://www.inc.com/karl-and-bill/5-ways-to-improve-customer-retention.html
 
[6] http://www.customerservicebasics.com/
 
[7] Lori Greenwell, “Ten ways to improve customer loyalty” [J] The Strategic Edge, Winter 2000 issue http://www.abadvisors.com/pdf/Loyalty%20article.PDF
 
Acknowledgement
 
Thanks to those people who have contributed to the writing of this final paper, especially my tutor Mr. Guan Jian.
 
I would also like to acknowledge my debt to my close friend, Zhang Yanhong who has given me a lot of mental support during the research of religions and all the teachers in our department, who I love, who have generously given numerous favor to me during my four years of college life here. Thank you!