Why Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected?

As its name suggests, customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on building enterprise profitability through the service and management of customer behavior and processes. It centers on the collection and analyses of customer-derived information to exploit this knowledge to better meet customer needs and business objectives. The APICS Dictionary describes CRM as a marketing philosophy where information is analyzed to provide marketing and sales with the necessary information to service customers' existing and potential needs. Thus, along with account management, catalog, and order entry, major commercial CRM software application areas include customer service and support (CSS), call centers, sales force automation (SFA), and marketing automation (MA). Of these, that latter two areas, SFA and MA best illustrate the interconnection between CRM and analytics.

With each new advance in technology, especially the proliferation of self-service channels like the Internet and wireless application protocol (WAP) phones, more elements of the customer service relationship is being managed electronically. Organizations are therefore looking for ways to personalize on-line experiences through tools such as help desk software, e-mail organizers, and Web development applications. For more information on other aspects of CRM, see CRM is Busting Out of Its Britches: Operational, Analytical, and Collaborative CRM Is Born.

Many CRM software vendors focused their first marketing modules to generate and convey leads to the sales force. SFA thus refers to the application of technology that enables selling through all channels, including field sales, telesales, selling partners, Web selling, and retail. The goal is to integrate technology with optimal processes providing continuous improvement in sales effectiveness, as well as providing balance and optimization to each enterprise sales channel.

But, while SFA was designed to equip a sales force to close deals, it typically does not influence customer adoption, which is the tenet at the heart of CRM. SFA is about acquiring new customers, but the CRM is also concerned with identifying, servicing, retaining, and increasing profitable customer relationships. The technologies that CRM harnesses should enable greater customer insight, increase customer access, create more effective interactions with customers and trading partners, and be integrated throughout customer channels and back-office enterprise functions

Thus to enable an organization to become more customer-centric, marketing departments must lead by example and improve the management of their operations, including better allocation of marketing resources with the highest value opportunities. This feat is only possible through the improved orchestration of the marketing function—marketing automation (MA). MA eventually leads to customer relationship optimization by applying customer insight and intelligence to plan the execution of customer interactions.

Building a better understanding of customer preferences to better serve their needs and increase their loyalty is certainly the motto for the new generation of MA systems. MA involves analyzing and automating the marketing process through information technology (IT) tools to allocate marketing resources to activities, channels, and media that will best meet customer needs while delivering profitability to the company. Its functional components include customer data cleansing, analysis tools, and campaign management systems. MA also enables new metrics, such as customer profitability, lifetime value, and wallet share to supplement the traditional metrics of market share and penetration.

All of these tools focus on determining what an enterprise's strategy should be during each customer interaction and these interactions fall within the following three categories: outbound campaigns, event-triggered interactions, and inbound interactions. For example, target marketing focuses marketing activities specifically on those people who are most likely to buy a company's products and services. Data gathered on people who use the Internet enables companies to identify and focus on more likely candidates. Retention efficiency is a measurement of how well a company creates repeat customers. Marketing cost analysis is the study and evaluation of the relative profitability or costs of different marketing operations in terms of customers, marketing units, commodities, territories, or marketing activities. Cost accounting is also typically used.

These tools are used to replace or enhance human intelligence by scanning through massive storehouses of data to discover meaningful new correlations, patterns and trends by using pattern recognition technologies and statistics. Likewise, predictive analytics drills even deeper. It is a statistical method that includes all analytics to predict the probable future outcome of an event and falls under data mining, a class of database applications that look for hidden patterns and support decision-making by forecasting the outcomes of different scenarios.

Ultimately, given the depth of information MA processes can pull out, MA is an integral part of a sound CRM strategy that can help drive organizational alignment through its analysis of markets, customers, and segments. For example, it can help guide marketing campaigns and identify segments of the customer base that is likely to cancel their subscription. For more info, see Marketing Automation: Coming of Age Slowly.

Campaign Management

Once patterns and trends are discerned, the next step is to apply what has been learned. Overall, basic campaign management provides capabilities such as planning campaigns targeted at segmented audiences; keeping a history of all the campaigns that have been run; tracking and analyzing the response to various products and target segments; and executing and tracking responses, which help in generating leads for sales.

Campaign management and e-mail marketing functions were among the first modules for CRM vendors to include in their product offerings. Siebel Systems, E.piphany, Pivotal (now part of chinadotcom/CDC), DoubleClick, and Aprimo are some of the providers of such functionality. By using a campaign management tool, marketers can design multilayered marketing campaigns filtered by customer segments, and use the contact center capability to reach their target through multiple channels such as phone, portals, e-mail, direct mail, and personal digital assistant (PDA). Another functional category that falls within this realm and is also widely provided for is electronic marketing, which offers a web-accessible, enterprise resource that manages and delivers essential information to marketing's customers, both internal (sales, customer support, etc.) and external (prospects, media, partners, etc.). Integrated content management and customization have added value to the basic features of e-mail marketing by avoiding the pitfalls of traditional mass marketing.

Marketing analytics adds a new dimension to basic campaign management. With marketing analytics, marketers can conduct customer behavioral analysis and understand key issues such as propensity to buy. Traditional CRM vendors such as Pivotal, PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle), and Siebel have been offering marketing analytics mostly through former acquisitions. Marketing analytics is also offered by other pure MA players such as Chordiant, E.piphany, SAS Institute, and Unica.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/why-are-crm-and-analytics-intrinsically-connected-18114/

Marketing Automation: Coming of Age Slowly

The debate about the future of the marketing automation and management market, as a stand-alone sub segment of the entire customer relationship management (CRM) market, continues, partly owing to mixed signals coming from relevant point solutions providers. On one hand, recent demise, and buyout of Xchange by Amdocs (see Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties) was the last in the array of less-fortunate point players. At the time prior to Xchange's assets auction, allegedly over twenty companies expressed interest in buying Xchange's assets, and in maintaining its products and supporting its customers, including much better-performing direct competitors Chordiant Software, DoubleClick, SAS, and especially Unica Corporation. While the upbeat marketing management software vendor Unica (www.unicacorp.com) was initially marked as a very likely buyer of Xchange, the vendor, however, slightly surprisingly elected not to make a bid for the Xchange's assets. Rather, Unica has since announced a migration plan from Xchange's solutions to its Affinium platform, given it has already migrated approximately 15 percent of Xchange's customer base to Affinium, and the vendor touts that regardless of which company has taken ultimate ownership of Xchange's remaining assets, converting to Affinium will be the most attractive solution for Xchange customers.

The CRM market as well as its marketing automation sub-segment remains both the land of opportunity albeit with many sinister patches of quicksand traps for those with small footprint breadth in the field. While the biggest or the richest packaged suite CRM or enterprise resource planning (ERP) providers have been able to hang onto flat new sales, possibly modest declines, or in more rare cases possibly modest growth, only a lucky and more probably the most apt few with a true differentiation in a selected number of markets have even bucked the trend and have shown some enviable growth.

Every business cycle begins with the attraction of the customer through sales and marketing. This hopefully results in an order management and fulfillment process and ends with a customer service, which can involve anything from field installations through to enquiry and complaint management. All of these steps have to be executed well without exception, since otherwise, the customer will end up on a competitor's list of customers. The "64,000-dollar" question is how all business processes work together. In the electronic world, the degree of flexibility and efficiency of collaborative processes relating to the customer life cycle, product life cycle, and service life cycle, to name but a few, will be a big determinant of losers and winners. To that end, there seems to be a dichotomy between the marketing automation promise of benefits enterprise-wide and the way it has often been misused.

Appeal of Marketing Automation

The importance of finding and keeping customers has only increased lately amid diminishing new sales opportunities. The appeal of marketing automation has come from its ability to tailor marketing campaigns and to track their effectiveness and control marketing costs and to perform better-targeted, finer-grained, multi-stage and multi-channel campaigns. These applications thus aim at helping organizations segment their customer bases, identify specific customer needs that are not that obvious to a naked eye, and build promotions and personalized campaigns designed to meet those needs and thereby create additional revenue.

This is all done by analyzing large volumes of scattered data, and then by identifying patterns or trends that would not otherwise be apparent (particularly if one is to notice an opportunity from a non-event, such as a customer has not used the ATM in the last month). With this information in hand, enterprises can create custom campaigns and track their effectiveness, and they can also leverage it to drive other processes, such as real time, customer service interactions or cross-sell opportunities (for example, customer service agents recommend products ad hoc upon customer needs over the phone, or real time offers and promotions personalized to customers navigating a web site).

In a nutshell, marketing automation software should be able to capture, blend, mine, and analyze large amounts of customer data from multiple sources, including online registries or directories, customer databases, flat files, billing systems, and external customer lists. That data is then used to target a consistent message across multiple channels to specific segmented (profiled) customer sets. Theoretically, these applications may justify the ROI rationale through

* A more effective customer acquisition, owing to extremely focused campaigns that are personalized and tailored to specific customer segments

* Increased customer retention, owing to improved value for existing customers by continually presenting personalized product and service marketing messages to more profitable customers, and through effective cross-selling opportunities that leverages purchasing histories and increases the likelihood of repeat business

* Improved marketing strategies in almost real time, via the ability to examine many indicators such as customer response rates, conversion rates, web site metrics, abandon rates and general demographic data to continually fine-tune customer segments and profiles, and discontinue marketing approaches that are futile if not even counterproductive

* Cost reduction, via the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns and to identify successful strategies, to readdress ineffective campaigns and to manage the costs of all campaigns within the organization

Analysis of the Marketing Automation Market

The marketing automation market has been fragmented since its advent, and one could discern three major sub-categories of solutions:

1) marketing operations,

2) marketing analytics, and

3) campaign management solutions. Marketing operations software aims at managing and tracking the costs, resources and goals of multiple marketing programs, and campaigns across multiple lines of business (LOBs). Marketing analytics solutions, as the name suggests, were designed to capture customer data from various channels and data sources, and to analyze (i.e., "slice and dice") that data in different angles for customer segmentation, profiling and personalization purposes. Finally, campaign management software attempts to design, schedule, execute,and measure the effectiveness of multichannel (including direct mail, telemarketing, customer service centers, computer-telephony-interaction (CTI), the web pages, e-mail, etc.) marketing campaigns that leverage the input from marketing analytics.

The other way to segment these applications would be to discern whether they are designed to primarily improve the use of marketing resources or to improve the value proposition to customers, or both. The focus of the first is on designing and creating a marketing strategy, determining the best allocation of marketing budgets, managing marketing staff skills, and effectively tracking and supporting marketing processes. On the other hand, the latter applications define and communicate the value proposition of the organization to the customer, ensuring the profitable creation, development and maintenance of the customer relationship. All three previously identified categories of applications would contribute to both purposes, particularly marketing analytics, although marketing operations will seemingly be more associated with the use of marketing resources, and campaign management would conversely be aligned with customer relationship optimization.

However, despite cited benefits of the applications, many marketing automation specialists have, for various reasons, been a far cry from success or, at least, not had an easy time. Most of pure-play providers have been either acquired or gone bust during the past few years including Xchange, Prime Response, BroadBase, Protagona, and MarketFirst, and those that remain independent (such as Aprimo, SAS, NCR Teradata, Blue Martini Software, DoubleClick, and Unica) are apparently creating broader marketing suites to cover all the above-mentioned bases.

One reason for this is the ability of large packaged ERP or CRM suite providers to slow or even stall enterprise applications buying decisions even well before their serious market entry. As a result, the niche vendors have to battle to maintain their market dominance despite strong solutions. Meanwhile the large vendors are still developing astute solutions and market credibility, and attempting to sell these based primarily on the integration of their limited functionality with the rest of their suites and a promise of deeper and complete functionality some time in the future. This category would include the likes Siebel Systems, Chordiant Software, Pivotal, E.piphany, Kana, Onyx, Amdocs, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle.

Incidentally, Applix, with its recent exit from the CRM market (see Will A Big Fish's Splash Cause Minnows' Flush Out Of The CRM Pond?), may exemplify the dark side of the CRM medal nowadays, as droves of smaller pure-play CRM vendors have been hard pressed to survive owing to the combined effect of CRM users' disenchantment with the products' hardly ever materialized benefits, compounded with the tight IT budgets due to the delay of the worldwide economic recovery and with Microsoft's entry into already crowded place. Although many mid-market pure-CRM solutions have been maturing and improving, they must continue to facilitate integration with back-end systems, given the increasing awareness of this need for full-fledged benefits of CRM. Further, they must also provide the differentiation through verifiable ROI metrics, and indispensable features and functions germane to selected industry verticals.

Larger CRM vendors have, on their side, been weathering the storm by relying on cross-selling broader CRM application suites to their existing and potential customers, involving also components such as sales force automation (SFA), employee relationship management (ERM) or call centers. Marketing automation point solution providers have also fallen prey to pessimistic investors and diminishing global corporations' appetites for technology. They have taken the impact of the slowdown because of a more budding market yet to create the market awareness of its true value proposition, and because of the slower adoption of information technology (IT) in marketing departments (such as a cultural resistance to software automation, which is perceived as restrictive to the art of marketing, with an oversight that automation might actually eliminate the low-value activity to release more time for true creative work).

The fact is that most CRM deployments so far have focused on operational aspects like automating tasks in processing interactions with customers, whether that is registering a complaint in call center, closing a sale, or responding to a customer or prospect's query. The irony is that these transactions are often left to languish in multiple database islands dispersed around the organization, and not used to refine marketing campaigns or to improve customer service. Marketing is possibly the only remaining major business function yet to revise its core processes so it can take advantage of IT that can cut time, costs, and improve the quality of its operations.

Moreover, unlike SFA or customer service, marketing has an effect on customers throughout the entire relationship tenure, since, for example focus groups, marketing campaigns, sales collaterals, and even aftermarket activities (such as warranty registration and service calls) present opportunities for companies to ascertain and control how their products are perceived in the market. With information being disseminated and gathered from many diverse sources, a unified marketing platform could be an instrumental to improve enterprises' demand and revenue management strategies.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/marketing-automation-coming-of-age-slowly-17282/

When Customer Relationships Meets Business Intelligence Marketing Analysis

Strategic moves by SAS Institute (see Part Two of this note) are a response to the requirement that modern business intelligence (BI) suites be able to access and present key business measures for sales, customer service, the supply chain, financials, purchasing, inventory, and many other areas. In addition to these functions, BI suites must also provide the ability to use information building blocks as the basis for comparisons, calculations, ratios, and metrics. Users should be able to dynamically combine business measures to derive key performance indicators (KPI), such as product profitability, margin analysis, book-to-bill ratios, return on investment (ROI), and other vital metrics. Typical data that manufacturing enterprises should know about, on a daily basis, include inventory situation, rejected items, throughput, booked sales, order status, on-time shipments, and warranty levels. In each of these categories, users may want to get behind the numbers and trends to discern the root causes or find out what items, regions, channel partners, or customers are involved.

Part Three of the SAS: Striving to Sustain Leadership series.

For many reasons, SAS's alliance with Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX) and partnership with Aprimo might be one of the few vendor partnerships where both customers and vendors benefit. By including customer, supplier, and information technology-related (IT) intelligence, SAS has a product functional scope that moves well beyond financial BI solutions to espouse a holistic corporate performance management (CPM) vision. However, the company will still face strong competition in many vertical markets from other leading BI vendors, such as Cognos and Business Objects. We believe SAS could further strengthen its position and enter more vertical markets by espousing a stronger original equipment manufacturer (OEM) or independent software vendor (ISV) partner strategy, which enables third parties to add their vertical, industry-specific experience, and accompanying front-ends and tools to SAS' analytical engine. The resulting packages could be resold into large and mid-market companies in those verticals.

In addition to the ongoing competition from a plethora of traditional BI players, or from statistical package market players, such as Insightful's S-Plus and SPSS, SAS is also facing a new nemesis in Siebel. Siebel designed Siebel Enterprise Analytics from the scratch and with data integration in mind. In two years, this product has grown from a few early adopters to become one of the vendor's fastest-growing, and possibly the largest product lines in 2004.

Needless to say, Siebel has long been a customer relationship management (CRM) archrival to Aprimo in the realm of enterprise marketing management (EMM), but it has also posed challenges to Amdocs in the call center and customer service space within the telecommunication sector. Both Siebel and Amdocs the largest two remaining pure-play CRM vendors and the competition with Amdocs has only intensified after Siebel acquired the billing and customer self-service provider eDocs, in late 2004. Given Siebel's recent intrusion into the BI market, we might even stand to be corrected by calling it a "semi-pure" customer relationship management (CRM) player. In any case, discussion indicates an intrinsic link between CRM and BI, which is possibly best illustrated within the market automation (MA) and customer service and call center markets (see Marketing and Intelligence, Together at Last and Analyze This).

Despite the challenge posed by Siebel and other rivals, SAS' move to build partnerships, especially with Amdocs should meet the growing need of communications service providers (CSP) seeking to build more profitable customer relationships. Until recently, crucial information was locked in Amdocs' disparate systems, such as billing, CRM, orders management, mediation, etc. and given this, CSPs were questioning such systems value. Through the collaboration between Amdocs and SAS, CSPs should now be able to collect this information and derive useful analyses to gauge the climate of the market and the temperament of their clients, and adjust and build services accordingly. Likewise, if successful, the vendors will also find profitability. SAS will be able to strengthen its position in the telecommunications market and extend its functional CRM footprint and Amdocs will be able to drive its MA strategy forward, and justify its new direction to its current customers. For more information see Amdocs Overhauls Its Marketing series, Part Three.

This is Part Three of a three-part note.

Part One profiled SAS.

Part Two discussed alliances, partnerships, and acquisitions.

Challenges

To compete with leading BI and data warehouse companies and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors that are moving into these markets, SAS needs to further open its products to make it easier to employ third-party tools. Also, like Cognos, Hyperion, and Business Objects, SAS should also exploit the current, weaker BI technology position of many ERP vendors to foster relationships with them, rather than viewing them as the adversaries.

SAS may also have to further adjust its business model. Currently, it still primarily provides its software on an outdated mainframe licensing model, deriving over half of its revenues from annual license fees that amount to about one-third of the initial licensing cost of its products. This provides SAS with a steady income, but may not be an attractive option for many prospective customers. SAS should consider moving to a more common enterprise software licensing model with annual support costs in the range of 15 percent of license costs. With its new product, SAS 9, SAS may be showing signs of recognizing that the old model of selling a complex tool kit, and then training its customers' internal staff on the tools, needs to be extended to many levels within the user enterprise. Strong vertical tailoring, more consultancy, and more out-of-the-box functionality to all areas in a business process are other positive signs that should be further exploited by SAS.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/when-customer-relationships-meets-business-intelligence-marketing-analysis-and-user-recommendations-18109/

Marquee Vendors Partner for Deepening Inherent CRM and BI Links

The strong connection between business intelligence (BI) and customer relationship management (CRM) is being recognized by companies and vendors alike. In order to extend the customer life cycle and meet customer needs, enterprises are looking beyond mere call lists and focus group information. They are seeking to exploit the vast amounts of information they already have on their customers, in order to build more effective marketing strategies, retain profitable customers, and let go of customer liabilities. Leveraging predictive analysis and other analytics, will enable enterprises to drill deeply into customer and market segmentation and improve product lifecycle management (PLM) to possibly reduce operating costs, enhance customer loyalty and lifetime value, and increase profitability.

Perhaps the tightest connection between CRM and BI can be seen in marketing automation (MA). MA involves analyzing and automating the marketing process to better allocate resources into various activities, channels, and media to build and enhance profitable customer relationships. This moves beyond traditional metrics to incorporate data cleansing, analysis tools, and campaign management systems (see the article Why Are CRM and Analytics Intrinsically Connected?)

Despite the complementary nature of CRM and BI, the implementation of MA has been stunted by slow markets and pessimistic investors. MA point solutions are often seen as luxuries when compared to broader CRM or enterprise resource management (ERP) solutions. Thus, vendors in CRM and BI, respectively, are building alliances in order to gain market share and illustrate the value of MA.

For example, SAS Institute, the world's leader in BI, in particular has been busy forging partnerships. It announced a global strategic alliance with Amdocs, a global telecommunications leader, to help communications service providers (CSP) unlock valuable intelligence from underlying operational systems. The alliance promises to leverage Amdocs' telecommunications industry expertise and established operational applications and SAS' predictive analytics and profitability software to give CSPs a combination of strong analytical software, business consulting, and implementation services. Together, Amdocs and SAS have created a Customer Profitability and Segmentation solution, and Amdocs will encourage its campaign management customers to migrate to SAS' Marketing Automation 4 offering. Customers will also be offered the SAS Telecommunications Intelligence Solutions.

For a detailed discussion of Amdocs see Amdocs Overhauls Its Marketing. For a detailed discussion of SAS see SAS: Striving To Sustain Leadership.

In addition to its strategic alliance with Amdocs, SAS has also announced that it will incorporate Aprimo Marketing Suite into SAS Marketing Automation. Aprimo pioneered the concept of marketing resource management (MRM), which centers on tracking marketing resources, including budgets and marketing skills to generate effective marketing strategies—a crucial activity given an age of shrinking budgets in marketing departments. It combines workflow capabilities for assigning tasks and triggering alerts and knowledge management (KM) to comply with marketing best practices.

The "name game" is also coming into play as vendors try and differentiate themselves from the competition to show the depth and coverage of their point solutions. For example, Aprimo and Unica refer to their products as enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions to illustrate that their solutions surpass the limits of MA to offer tighter control over projected budgets, planning, and execution. Aprimo, in particular has created a Web-based software product that is designed to interface with and enhance ERP and CRM systems. To date, the company seems to be successful, as it boasts the Bank of America, Alticor, and Ernst & Young as among its clients. Unica also claims an impressive list. Its clients include AmBank, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Best Buy. For more information on Aprimo and Unica, see Can the Market Sustain a Stand-Alone EMM? and Should Uniqueness Vouch for Marketing Automation Niche Players?

Marketing Automation Consolidation

Given the difficult market climate, only a few MA providers remain. Unica, Aprimo, MarketSwitch, and MarketSoft, have footholds in the market, but its questionable how steady their footing is. Acquisitions are abound as the strongest solution providers look to broaden and enhance their current offerings. The acquisition of Annuncio by PeopleSoft (which itself was acquired by Oracle, proving that anything is fair game in the IT sector) (see PeopleSoft Annuncio-es Continuation Of Its Shopping Spree); MarketFirst by Pivotal; Protagona by DoubleClick; Point Information Systems by S1 Corporation; DataSage by Vignette Corporation; Prime Response by Chordiant, and the merger of Kana and Broadbase (see The Mid-Market Is Consolidating, Lo and Behold), indicates the diminished life expectancy of independent CRM point solutions providers.

Blue Martini Software has also fallen into consolidation. Blue Martini is a provider of sales optimization systems, and has recently boosted its analytical capabilities and bringing its new functionality to the forefront of its latest product suite. In May, 2005, Blue Martini announced that it will be acquired by Multi-Channel Holdings, which is a privately-held Golden Gate Capital portfolio company and the parent entity of multi-channel retail software vendor Ecometry, which is a predominantly retail-mail-order-oriented company. Multi-Channel Holdings was likely attracted to Blue Martini by the opportunity to round out its retail portfolio with a B2C e-commerce solution.

Blue Martini's strategy has changed many times. The company began as an e-commerce application vendor for business-to-business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) businesses with an on-line presence. However, it started to develop products as a multichannel CRM suite vendor, intruding even into the dubious partner relationship management (PRM) realm (see What Does the Future Hold for PRM?). In 2002, with the purchase of Cybrant, Blue Martini entered B2B, on the sell-side of e-commerce, because Cybrant provided the configuration for guided-selling functionality. From there, Blue Martini then narrowed its focus to only two industries—retail and manufacturing. In 2004, the company backpedaled its positioning as a CRM suite provider to focus on interactive selling optimization, mainly due to declining business in e-commerce and CRM markets. Before being acquired, the vendor shifted focus away from its traditional B2C e-commerce positioning into more generic support for all selling channels, such as mobile sales, and will now likely focus only on retail.

Other Prospective Industries for Alliance

MA solution providers are searching for different markets to peddle their wares. Financial services is a promising target as their need for strong customer service capabilities is clear. They have millions of customers generating significant transaction volume each month, and consequently, focuses even greater resources on customer support than the telecommunications industry. Testing this market opportunity is Amdocs. Amdocs' offers an integrated customer management strategy that should be well-suited for this industry. ABN AMRO, a Dutch bank, recently selected Amdocs to join its efforts to modernize and consolidate its transactional systems for its business and consumer retail banking customers in the Netherlands. The Amdocs solution will integrate information from disparate systems onto a single, unified platform, allowing the bank to launch new bundled services and cross-product price plans and discounts, reduce operating costs and time to market for new services, and increase efficiency, all while improving the overall customer experience.

Deregulated gas and electricity (and even waterworks to some degree) energy and utility companies, may also be a viable market for MA providers. Utilities companies are now operating in a competitive, dynamic environment that is quite different from what it faced previously as a near-monopoly. In particular, the introduction of a dynamic trading market for energy has meant price fluctuations that puts a strain on the internal resources of energy companies.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/marquee-vendors-partner-for-deepening-inherent-crm-and-bi-links-18117/

A Customer Relationship Management Solution Aims To Cover all the Bases

Surado Solutions Inc., founded in 1995, is a privately held company based in Riverside, California (US), and offers a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.

Surado aims to provide a complete CRM suite, rather than a modularized solution targeted towards departmental delivery. Its goal is to build full-featured, integrated, and multifaceted systems, as well as out-of-the-box solutions. The vendor is a Microsoft Certified Partner and Microsoft Business Solutions Certified Gold Partner, and uses the Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) as the foundation for its product development. It also touts the merits of the Six Sigma methodology and Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) as quality improvement philosophies.

Surado targets the small and medium business (SMB) market, namely organizations with annual revenues of $1 million (USD) to $1 billion (USD), and approximately 88 percent of its clients fall into this category. To reinforce its position in this market segment, Surado offers Surado Small Business CRM 5.0, designed for ten users or less. Surado Small Business combines the core Surado CRM suite (Contact & Account Management, Sales Automation, Marketing Automation, and Customer Service/Help Desk) with Integration for Exchange (for e-mail, contacts, and tasks), the Surado Integration Module (for connecting to third party databases or creating custom tables and screens), and Surado CRM Web (a web interface for remote user access to basic functionality.

Although Surado CRM is not vertical-centric, it enjoys a wide installed base in traditionally "vertical CRM"-dominated industries, such as technology, health care, education, banking and finance, and government. The vendor has customers in all fifty US states and in over sixty-four countries worldwide. A sampling of its top clients from those vertical industries includes Blackbox, County Regional Medical Center, California State University, Georgia Student Finance, and the City of Riverside Economic Development Agency.

We'll analyze Surado CRM 5.0 from the perspectives of core CRM functionality, look at some of its distinguishing factors, and discuss some of the challenges users may face when considering Surado CRM for small to midsized businesses.

Core Functionality of Surado CRM 5.0

Core CRM functionality covers five aspects:

* contact and account management
* sales management
* marketing management
* customer service and support
* integration

The figure below is a TEC-created table comparing Surado against other vendors and their offerings. Surado performs above other vendors in the areas of marketing automation, sales force automation, customer service and support, and partner management. In the areas of contract management and creation, and project management, Surado's performance is above average, but below the highest-rated competitor.

B2B (Business-to-Business) CRM Module Ratings


Source: http://www.vendor-showcase.com/software/281-16091-idealprofile/Customer-Relationship-Management-CRM/Surado-CRM-by-Surado-Solutions/ideal_customer.html

Contact and Account Management
This area of CRM typically displays and manages detailed account information, such as information related to the company, contacts within the company review of past activities and history, scheduling, and task management.

This module offers a unified interface for account and contact management functionality, where users can review past communications, upcoming activities, sales opportunities, quotes and purchases, support issues, links to relevant documents, and information from back-end systems. In addition, Surado CRM also captures all customer communications, whether through phone, e-mail, fax, the Internet, or personal contacts. A fully integrated workgroup scheduling and task management features the ability to track activities, participants, and resources, including pop-up reminders. A relationships tab also allows users to track the important relationships that may exist between two or more contacts in the system that otherwise might otherwise be overlooked or poorly managed.

Sales Management
This area of a CRM solution focuses on managing sales opportunities and processes. It provides the features and functionality to define, implement, manage, and execute one or more sales cycles, based on individual opportunity types. This allows users of Surado CRM to configure the system to better fit their unique needs rather than having to conform to a generic sales cycle supplied by the system.

The module includes the basics: contact information, correspondence, opportunity and forecasting data, literature and presentations, quotes, orders, and post-sale service history.

Surado CRM 5.0 allows for multi-source data import from lists, or captured leads from a web site through its eLeads module. It also allows inquiry tracking and intelligent leads routing. Automated process can be initiated to distribute literature, schedule follow-up activities, and set conditions to advance opportunities. Managers can use Surado CRM to monitor team activities across customized sales stages across multiple product pipelines. Sales positioning features and functionalities are also available through competitive intelligence analysis and customer analytics, to identify habits, trends, and potential.

Marketing Management
In this area of CRM, the key components to attracting and retaining a customer base are evaluation, design, implementation, and execution of marketing initiatives.

The application can track the results of advertisements, direct mail, and telemarketing, and help design, execute, and manage personalized, permission-based campaigns. Surado CRM 5.0 also allows for the planning, design, execution, and management of multichannel permission-based marketing campaigns. Users can assign tasks and responsibilities according to revenue projections, campaign periods, targeted audiences, and channels. Potential deployment issues can be identified, and resources re-allocated. E-mail and fax campaigns can be set up for automated execution and follow-up.

Surado CRM provides for campaign return on investment (ROI) analysis as a means to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, by comparing potential and actual responses and sales.

Customer Service and Support
This area of a CRM solution is where customer service inquiries and support issues are entered, tracked, and in specific cases, escalated to resolution.

Surado CRM 5.0 features a customer service, help desk, and support knowledge base, with keyword searches. It also provides an integrated system that coordinates and tracks customer interactions across multiple contact points to address customer inquires.

Surado CRM automates support and help procedures, by automatically converting incoming e-mail messages into support tickets (including attachments), responding to support tickets, and notifying customers of soon-to-expire service-level agreements (SLAs). It also handles routing, load balancing, escalation based on multiple criteria, automated response, and ticket updates and deletions.

In addition, Surado's Web Self-Service module provides a channel for clients to access an Internet knowledge base search as well as conduct self-service ticket submission and review.

Key metrics are displayed in graphical form, and can provide managers with the information necessary to make rapid decisions regarding re-deployment of resources to the most urgent support areas. Performance gauges (such as support metrics by urgency, touch point, area, type, and support groups) provide managers with the opportunity to act quickly to prevent potential bottlenecks in providing support. Finally, color-coded alerts for events that fall outside defined parameters provide managers the ability to take a proactive approach, preventing escalation of support issues.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-customer-relationship-management-solution-aims-to-cover-all-the-bases-18676/

Should Uniqueness Vouch For Marketing Automation Niche Players?

The debate about the future of the marketing automation and management market, as a stand-alone sub segment of the entire customer relationship management (CRM) market, continues, partly owing to mixed signals coming from relevant point solutions providers. On one hand, recent demise and buyout of Xchange by Amdocs (see Xchange Adds To The List Of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties) was the last in the array of less-fortunate point players. At the time prior to Xchange's assets auction, allegedly over 20 companies expressed interest in buying Xchange's assets, and in maintaining its products and supporting its customers, including much better-performing direct competitors Chordiant Software, DoubleClick, SAS and especially Unica Corporation. While the upbeat marketing management software vendor Unica (www.unicacorp.com) was initially marked as a very likely buyer of Xchange, the vendor however slightly surprisingly elected not to make a bid for the Xchange's assets. Rather, Unica has since announced a migration plan from Xchange's solutions to its Affinium platform, given it has already migrated approximately 15% of Xchange's customer base to Affinium, and the vendor touts that regardless of which company has taken ultimate ownership of Xchange's remaining assets, converting to Affinium will be the most attractive solution for Xchange customers.

Incidentally, on May 16, Unica, now a globally-present provider of solutions it refers to as Enterprise Marketing Management (EMM), announced it instead acquired Marketic, one of leading providers of campaign management software in Europe and a subsidiary of Groupe DDB in France, the second largest global communications group. As a result of the acquisition, Unica believes it has secured the leadership position in the French and Southern European markets as well as in some new industries like automotive. In addition, the deal should expand Unica's worldwide customer base to over 300, making it possibly the largest provider of marketing software globally.

Through the acquisition of Marketic, Unica also expects to bolster its strong position in sectors such as financial services, retail and telecommunications, since Marketic's customers include Disneyland Paris, Orange, Crdit Lyonnais, Groupe Cofinoga and Peugeot. In turn, Unica's respected customers include Lands' End, Medco Health Solutions, Bank of Montreal, Nordstrom, ABN AMRO, Cintas, Club Med, SNCF, EDF, Scotiabank, Choice Hotels International and AIG. Further, combined with its strong base of existing customers such as Marks & Spencer Financial Services, ARG Equation, Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) and Vodafone, Unica now claims an installed customer base in 10 European countries. Building on its two-year presence in the UK and now in France, Unica also expects to benefit from Marketic's strong presence in the Benelux countries (i.e., Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg) and Spain. From this strong base, Unica plans to further expand across Europe.

Unica pledges to continue to sell Marketic solutions, which include software for campaign management and loyalty marketing. In addition, Marketic's customers should benefit from the added capabilities available in Unica's Affinium Suite, such as predictive analysis, data mining, multi-channel campaign optimization, real-time event triggers and marketing content management. Based on an open, scalable architecture, Unica's Affinium Suite aims at enabling marketers to gather and analyze knowledge from multiple data sources; identify customer wants and needs; plan, execute and manage tailored programs for interactions through multiple touch points; and measure and optimize marketing effectiveness. The Affinium Suite is also fully internationalized with Unicode support and will reportedly be available in a localized version for the French market starting in June 2003.

A few days later, on May 19, Unica announced the addition of two new consulting services -- Affinium Operational Services (AOS) and Affinium Innovation Services (AIS) -- to its Unica Consulting Services portfolio. Introduced at Unica's Global Customer Conference 2003, these two new programs aim at enabling customers to maximize their Affinium investment through innovative strategies, techniques and recommendations, since they will be delivered by experienced and skilled Unica consultants and partners with deep product knowledge and extensive cross-industry marketing experience. For customers currently using Affinium, AOS offers both the services and resources to expand their use of Affinium within their organization. To that end, AOS programs include:

* Advanced Techniques Workshop to offer expertise, tips and techniques on how to use the advanced customer-focused strategies and features of Affinium for specific business environments and to increase user productivity and marketing return on investment (ROI);
* Performance Optimization to pinpoint opportunities to enhance performance and scalability to optimize and streamline campaigns;
* Post-Production Support to provide staffing support, ranging from a few weeks to several months, to cover staffing or skill gaps and ensure the timely and successful completion of key projects.

With AIS, Affinium customers will be supported through each stage of the marketing life cycle. The four key programs include:

1. Enterprise Marketing Assessment to identify where marketing processes can be optimized for greater efficiency and to help develop specific strategies to meet marketing objectives;
2. Incorporating Predictive Modeling to use companies' current data to show how to create models, interpret the results, and then act on the information yielding positive, profitable and differentiated outcomes;
3. Enterprise Marketing Planning to establish an optimal marketing planning process that provides real insight into the business and enhances decision-making; and
4. E-Marketing Review to provide recommendations and a route map to assist companies in successfully addressing the issues surrounding online and real-time marketing.

In addition to providing the above services directly to customers, the AOS and AIS programs complement Unica's alliance partner program, given the vendor can deliver AOS and AIS to customers in cooperation with alliance partner teams and offers training to alliance partners on delivering these services.

Affinium 5

The above moves follow on recent major product releases' delivery and impressive annual financial results. At the end of 2002, Unica announced the general availability of Affinium 5, only a half year after the release of Affinium 4 , which somewhat resembles the time apart between the recent Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions movie trilogy parts' releases. The Affinium 5 release aimed at delivering a marketing solution that provides one of the richest and most intuitive functionalities for managing and deriving increased value from the entire marketing process -- from strategic planning and budgeting to predictive analysis and cross-channel relationship optimization to campaign execution, resource management and closed-loop analytic reporting.

Featuring significant enhancements to its campaign management, e-marketing, resource management and optimization capabilities, Affinium aims at facilitating efficient cross-organization collaboration, workflow and the accessibility of marketing technology, while increasing organizational agility and customer-focused marketing aptitude. Additionally, Affinium is modular, so organizations can choose the functionality they need now and add capabilities over time. New functionality includes sophisticated relationship optimization; marketing content management; advanced real-time e-mail marketing capabilities; and new rapid start templates for planning and managing marketing initiatives such as marketing events and cross-channel acquisition campaigns.

With the shipment of Affinium 5 at the start of its new fiscal year, Unica believes to be well positioned to build on the strong momentum it has sustained over the past five years. In 2002, Unica reportedly grew by 27% and achieved record revenue, profitability and cash flow from operations. Unica closed the year with more than 250 customers in the financial services, retail, hospitality, health care, pharmaceutical, insurance, telecommunications, publishing and business-to-business services industries, many of which are Fortune 100 companies. Unica also continued its international expansion into Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific markets and entered into agreements with a number of technology and professional services partners worldwide including Epsilon, Harte-Hanks, Headstrong Japan, IBM Global Services, Premier Technologies and Sophron Partners.

Market Impact

Hats off to Unica for being a shining example of a successful privately-held niche vendor, in spite of difficult economic environment and despite belonging to arguably prosperous market segment. The CRM market as well as its marketing automation sub-segment remains both the land of opportunity albeit with many sinister patches of quicksand traps for those with small footprint breadth in the field. While the biggest and/or the richest packaged suite CRM/ERP providers have been able to hang onto flat new sales, possibly modest declines, or in more rare cases possibly modest growth, only a lucky and/or more probably the most apt few with a true differentiation in a selected number of markets have even bucked the trend and have shown some enviable growth. Unica seems to be defending the pride of the bittersweet marketing automation segment with its protractedly good performance against the odds.

Every business cycle begins with the attraction of the customer through sales and marketing. This hopefully results in an order management and fulfillment process and ends with a customer service, which can involve anything from field installations through to enquiry and complaint management. All of these steps have to be executed well without exception, since otherwise, the customer will end up on a competitor's list of customers. The 64,000-dollar question is how all business processes work together. In the electronic world, the degree of flexibility and efficiency of collaborative processes relating to the customer lifecycle, product lifecycle, and service lifecycle, to name but a few, will be a big determinant of losers and winners. To that end, there seems to be a dichotomy between the marketing automation promise of benefits enterprise-wide and the way it has often been misused. For a discussion of marketing automation, see "Marketing Automation: Coming of Age Slowly".

However, despite cited benefits of the applications, many marketing automation specialists have, for many reasons, been a cry far from a success or, at least, not had an easy time. Most of pure-play providers have been either acquired or bust during the past few years including Xchange, Prime Response, BroadBase, Protagona and MarketFirst, and those that remain independent (such as Aprimo, SAS, NCR Teradata, Blue Martini Software, DoubleClick, and Unica) are apparently creating broader marketing suites to cover all the above-mentioned bases.

One reason thereof is the phenomenon of large packaged ERP and/or CRM suite providers to slow or even stall enterprise applications buying decisions even well before their serious market entry. As a result, the niche vendors have to battle to maintain their market dominance despite strong solutions, while the large vendors are still developing astute solutions and market credibility, and attempting to sell these based primarily on the integration of their limited functionality with the rest of their suites and a promise of deeper and complete functionality some time in the future. This category would include the likes Siebel Systems, Chordiant Software, Pivotal, E.piphany, Kana, Onyx, Amdocs, PeopleSoft, SAP and Oracle.

Incidentally, Applix, with its recent exit from the CRM market (see Will A Big Fish's Splash Cause Minnows' Flush Out Of The CRM Pond?), may exemplify the dark side of the CRM medal nowadays, as droves of smaller pure-play CRM vendors have been hard pressed to survive owing to the combined effect of CRM users' disenchantment with the products' hardly ever materialized benefits, compounded with the tight IT budgets due to the worldwide economic recovery delay and with Microsoft's entry into already crowded place. Although many mid-market pure-CRM solutions have been maturing and improving, they must continue to facilitate integration with back-end systems, given the increasing awareness of this need for full-fledged benefits of CRM. Further, they must also provide the differentiation through verifiable ROI metrics, and indispensable features and functions germane to selected industry verticals.

Larger CRM vendors have, on their hand, been weathering the storm by relying on cross-selling broader CRM application suites to their existing and potential customers, involving also components such as Sales Force Automation (SFA), employee relationship management (ERM) or call centers. Marketing automation point solution providers have also fallen prey to pessimistic investors and diminishing global corporations' appetites for technology. They have taken the impact of the slowdown because of a more budding market yet to create the market awareness of its true value proposition, and because of the slower adoption of information technology (IT) in marketing departments (i.e., there is still cultural resistance to software automation, which is perceived as restrictive to the art of marketing, with an oversight that automation might actually eliminate the low-value activity to relax more time for true creative work.

Yet, these applications will have also often been perceived either as luxury (a nice to have' but not show-stopping) applications in these days of anyone hardly having any customers at all, or, in cases of customers valuing the proposition, they might be much more inclined to obtain it only as a part of a broader CRM suite (if not even from an ERP provider) rather than as a point solution. Thus, the need for providing a full, comprehensive CRM suite rather than an individual solution or a bundle of point solutions for each distinct CRM area remains firm, and will urge further CRM (and overall enterprise applications for that matter) market consolidation.

The gravity of these narrow product footprint vendors' predicament might be well illustrated by the Applix' exit, given the vendor had a solid CRM product breadth and technology foundation, a good implementation track record with nearly 1,000 satisfied customers, and some notable endorsements from ERP vendors that have been remiss in delivering their own CRM (i.e., SSA GT and Geac Computers Corporation). Many pure-play CRM players that cannot even come close to the above traits should do their own math and analyze the justification of their independent existence within the CRM battleground. Not surprisingly, marketing automation-only providers have long been falling away to the extent of only a few possibly also endangered remaining providers like Unica, Aprimo, MarketSwitch, and MarketSoft. PeopleSoft's acquisition of Annuncio (see PeopleSoft Annuncio-es Continuation Of Its Shopping Spree), Kana and Broadbase merger (see The Mid-Market Is Consolidating, Lo And Behold), Pivotal's recent acquisition of MarketFirst, DoubleClick's acquisition of Protagona, S1 Corporation's acquisition of Point Information Systems, Vignette Corporation's acquisition of DataSage, SAS' acquisition of Intrinsic and Verbind, and Chordiant's acquisition of Prime Response all should indicate diminishing life expectancy of independent CRM point solutions providers.

The good news nevertheless is that there are huge untapped opportunities for business improvement, given marketing has a unique vantage point in any enterprise to understand the customer needs, buying behavior, and value perception. Increasingly, marketing automation solutions are being adopted by large enterprises with multilevel, multi-LOB marketing departments. Those organizations need to coordinate their marketing programs and campaigns and are creating increased demand for holistic marketing-automation suites that include marketing operations, analytics and management functionality. Thus, we expect to see more marketing-automation suites that offer marketing analytics and campaign management in a single product offering. However, the large packaged enterprise suite vendors still have it as a mere afterthought to the product blueprint rather than a strategic enhancement to their product offering.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/should-uniqueness-vouch-for-marketing-automation-niche-players-16995/

Can the Market Sustain a Stand-Alone EMM?

The new millennium has completely redrawn the IT industry map especially in the enterprise marketing management (EMM) sector. Since year 2000, the number of independent marketing automation vendors has significantly shrunk due to frequent acquisitions and takeovers. Names such as Xchange, MarketFirst, Annuncio, and Prime Response no longer exist. Larger application providers like Amdocs, PeopleSoft, and Chordiant have assimilated all. Amongst the few still operating is Aprimo. Their strategy primarily targets large customers from the financial services, technology, media and entertainment, pharmaceuticals and manufacturing industries, and it pays. Aprimo just released its version 6.0 posed to help the vendor sustain the ongoing IT turmoil.

Building a better understanding of customer preferences to better serve their needs and increase their loyalty is certainly the motto for the new generation of marketing automation systems. Many customer relationship management (CRM) software vendors focused their first marketing modules in generating and conveying leads to the sales force.

Campaign management and e-mail marketing functions were amongst the first modules for CRM vendors to include in their product offerings. Siebel, E.piphany, Pivotal, DoubleClick, and Aprimo are some of the providers of such functionality. Marketers can design multilayered marketing campaigns filtering by customer segments and using the contact center capability to reach their target through multiple channels such as phone, portals, email, direct mail, and PDA.

The second functional category widely provided is electronic marketing. Such a solution offers a web-accessible, enterprise resource that manages and delivers essential information to marketing's customers, both internal (sales, customer support, etc.) and external (prospects, media, partners, etc.). Integrated content management and customization have added value to the basic features of e-mail marketing by avoiding the pitfalls of mass marketing.

Overall, basic campaign management modules provide the following capabilities:

* Planning campaigns targeted at segmented audiences

* Keeping a history of all the campaigns that have been run

* Tracking and analyzing the response to various products and target segments

* Executing and tracking responses, which help in generating leads for sales

Marketing analytics is the third component adding a new dimension to the basic campaign management modules. The analytics functionality enables marketers to conduct customer behavioral analysis and understand key issues such as propensity to buy. CRM vendors such as Pivotal, PeopleSoft, and Siebel are now offering marketing analytics through acquisitions beside other pure marketing players such as Chordiant, E.piphany, SAS, and Unica.

The most recent tool in the world of marketing automation is the emergence of the marketing resource management (MRM) pioneered by Aprimo. Facing shrinking budgets, marketing departments are more and more accountable for the cost of their activities. MRM helps marketing professionals to plan ahead for the following:

* Time for human resources

* Time for financial resources

* Responsibilities for different team members at different steps

MRM combines workflow capabilities for assigning tasks and triggering alerts and knowledge management to accede into marketing best practices. A tighter control over the projected budget, the planning, and the execution combined with a myriad of functions from campaign and lead management modules have pushed the limits of marketing automation and that is the reason vendors such as Aprimo and Unica are now referring to their products as enterprise marketing management (EMM) solutions.

Product Definition and Market Impact

Despite competition from both major CRM/ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendors and marketing analytics providers, pure-player marketing solutions like Aprimo, and Unica continue to serve the enterprise market place with new and updated EMM offerings. Recently Aprimo announced its new release Aprimo Marketing 6.0. The Indianapolis based firm, caters to big accounts like Merrill Lynch, America Online, Pfizer, and Autodesk. Its fully web-based solution encompasses functional areas such as marketing planning, financial management, production management, customer dialogue, and lead management applications. According to Mike MacNulty, a product marketing manager at Aprimo, "the product emphasize on application modularity contributes to deployment flexibility over time and quicker time-to-value". Production Management and Planning and Financial Management are two functional components geared towards the marketing resource management (MRM). The more traditional features such as campaign and lead manager are covered by the Demand Creation suite.

The Production Management modules deliver the necessary features to initiate and design through a scripted web template a marketing project from scratch. Features include internal or external resource assignments and management of cost by means of real time cost tracking. The pre-defined templates help marketers to follow the steps specified by best practices. The teamwork is fully auditable through online approvals for deliverables and creative. A rule based workflow manager, enables users to control quality standards like Six Sigma or financial regulatory rules like Sarbanes-Oxley.

The Planning and Financial Management modules confer to marketers financial visibility into their planned, committed and actual investments and provides the solution its expected MRM qualification. Using the budgeting and forecasting tool, defined users can be granted access to budget assignment, allocation, and transfer of funds. Links to a number of back-office applications, such as PO and AP systems, facilitate the exchange of financial data. Automated notifications for over- or under-plan conditions can be used by managers to control their marketing activities financials at different stages.

Customer Dialogue Management and Lead Management are the two major components of the Demand Creation suite. Users can leverage various demand creation modules to divide their customer list by segment and start targeting them using a multistep and multichannel marketing campaign. As a result they can automatically assign generated leads to specific sales groups or persons to conclude the sale.

Aprimo Marketing 6.0 .NET architecture takes full advantage of web services facilitating the interoperability of the application in a disparate system environment.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/can-the-market-sustain-a-stand-alone-emm-17268/

Customer Relationship Management Strategies Part Four: Strategies and Case Study

Keeping in mind the three main components of CRM, the customer, the relationship, and management, we will expand on specific customer relationship management (CRM) system strategies that will help you realize your investment.

Some crucial strategies you must adopt are

* Develop specific, measurable goals
* Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals
* Build the technical framework
* Identify explicit sales and marketing strategies
* Outline Internet strategies
* Develop and maintain customer satisfaction metrics

Develop specific, measurable goals

Vague, abstract mission statements were pervasive in the business culture of the 1980s. Companies sought to motivate their employees by posting "catchy" slogans and ambiguous corporate agendas all over their office spaces. Statements like "to provide the best quality" or "to provide quality customer service" are all positive goals that employees want to strive for. However, these mission statements are hard to live up to if there is not a substantial measure of standard to compare to. "Quality" and "Best" are all unquantifiable.

Create your catchy mission statements but find ways to quantify the results. Set specific and measurable goals. For example, increase your revenue by x percent, decrease product exchanges by y amount, increase profit margin by x dollars, decrease attrition by y percent. If you want to increase the quality of your product, consider what happens when your products are less than 100 percent quality. Do you spend more money replacing the product? More dollars are spent servicing products still under warranty. Does your call center experience more calls? Is there high wastage? Do you set out to decrease money spent on replacement products or parts by $100,000, or decrease call volume by 40 percent, or decrease wastage by half? These are goals your employees can understand and strive for.

This is Part Four of a four-part note.

Part One discussed new approaches to CRM implementation,

Part Two discussed implementation strategies, and Part Three described achieving and maintaining the competitive edge.

Establish ROI strategy to achieve your goals

It is no accident that CRM performance accounts for a large part of a companies profitability or lack there of. Once you've identified your goals, compare those numbers to the investment you've made in your CRM system. Create a return on investment (ROI) strategy that delivers the best return on your investment, and will provide more dividends in the future. Utilizing the analytical tools that your CRM applications provide is the key to understanding and defining a company CRM ROI. CRM analytics help companies to recognize consumer behavioral patterns and identify new opportunities in the marketplace. Mine your data to learn about customer's buying habits, their marketing profile, consumer risk thresholds, and segmentation.

The main objective here is to ascertain if your investment was worthwhile. Did it reach optimal return? If not, how much did it reach by? Can you make up for it in economy in size?

To calculate your ROI, estimate your per-customer cost of implementation. Add to it the cost of maintenance, including head count and overhead (of the employees you've added to support the system), hardware, storage, user education, and upgrades. Multiply this by the number of customers you have. This is the cost of your CRM initiative. Next take your number of customers multiply it by your gross profit, multiply that yet again by your success rate. Take the product and subtract from it the total cost of your CRM initiative. The result is your return on investment.

Calculating ROI involves numerous factors and the analytical tool in your CRM application will help you with the complex equation. However, you need to determine what elements need to be measured and how to measure them. Key elements include per customer cost for the implementation, maintenance (including any employees hired to maintain the system), user training, upgrades, and general overhead. Also include the gross profit and the success rate, which is normally expressed as a percentage. It is here were establishing metrics is crucial. You need to determine what factors will be included in the success rate, such as office efficiencies, sales growth, customer growth etc. and you need to establish how they will be weighed. Depending on your industry and your company's goal, the presence and weight of these factors vary. Remember, you need to establish that your CRM investment will not only pay back in time, it will actually make or save you money. Knowing where your company currently sits and where the CRM system will take it, will make the case for a CRM system.

Build the technical framework

CRM strategies are turned into action items by implementing innovative software and powerful databases. Your sales and marketing strategies have worked for you in the past—there is a reason why your company is a mid-market organization and not a small business. To continue on the path of growth, your organization needs to relate your sales and marketing actions to the technology at hand. The technology is there, take advantage of it. Why invest in the system and not exploit it to make your job and your employees' jobs easier?

Your CRM system can automate processes and provide data analytics. Before CRM, your marketing manager would storyboard a marketing campaign, hold meetings to discuss the idea, put together a spreadsheet of prospective customers, make multiple copies of the list, hand them out to each sales representatives, walk back to his office, and wait for his sales people to make the phone calls, and write up the order.

However, your CRM system can drastically reduce those manual steps. Collaborative tools are available to users for discussing ideas, getting budget authorization, obtaining concept approval, setting up meetings, and exchanging e-mails. Marketing tools can help you import lists, assign leads, qualify leads, generate quotes, and create sales orders.

Sales analytics can help you recognize patterns and track buying habits. Knowing how to use these individual tools is not enough. A successful CRM strategy encompasses the entire CRMBC. Integrate your sales and marketing functions with your customer service efforts, and circle around to your customer satisfaction evaluation. The CRMBC is a continuous feedback loop that integrates the application with organizational strategies to facilitate, gather, and process customer behavioral patterns in terms of discreet units of data.

Identify explicit sales and marketing strategy

How will you achieve your company's goals? What key sales and marketing strategies do you need to get your organization from point A to point B, from 10 percent profit margin to 30 percent profit margin, from 50 percent attrition rate to 25 percent, from 800 service calls a day to 500? Your plan must be specific and detailed. It should consider your customer's needs and how you react to those needs.

Sales and marketing strategies can utilize CRM to provide contact points with the customer to present product offerings. It is this interaction that your marketing plan must take advantage of. A sales person that makes an outbound call is an event that can trigger a step in your marketing strategy. When a customer calls into your service center, that is a contact point. How can your marketing department capitalize on this event?

Wrap your sales and marketing plans around these points of contact for opportunities to execute.

Outline Internet strategies

The World Wide Web has decreased the cost of doing business by enabling economy of scale. Nowhere else can you potentially reach billions of people, make millions of contact points, and create a fortune in opportunities, all with the luxury of mass communication, dynamic content, and instant recall. You can invest very little in Internet technology and receive a high return.

Mid-market companies seldom capitalize on this relatively inexpensive tool. Consider a mass mailing of 100,000 households. The list would cost you a few hundred if not thousand of dollars. The print and paper would cost you more, and postage, if mailing in the US, would set you back about $17,000 (USD). If you're lucky, you will get a 10 percent response rate. Most people will throw your mailer away. If it crosses their mind later, they won't remember what was on it and they certainly wouldn't have memorized your phone number.

Successful Internet strategies must have three characteristics:

* Facilitate user interaction
* Provide a benefit to the customer
* Add to value to your system

First, users will not stay long on your site if they cannot interact, whether they are reading valuable information they cannot easily get elsewhere, or they are engaging in an on-line game, or the visual aspects of your site fascinate them. Engage your audience.

Second, you must provide an advantage over traditional sales channels. An Internet strategy must meet a need your customer has but in a way that is timelier, more convenient, more accessible, or more economical. If your customer logs a request for service via the Internet, will it be completed more quickly? Can your customer register his product on the Internet easier than mailing in a postcard? If your customer purchased a product on your web site, can they get it for less than on the shelf? For example, Barnes and Noble sometimes offers their books for less on their web site than at their stores.

Third, take advantage of this channel to add value to your CRM system. Have your customers verify their address when they re-order a product. Ask your customers to take a survey. Capture your customer's interest by tracking their traffic through your site. Did they spend more time in the electronics section than in the book section? Track your customer's buying habits. Do your customers wait for a sale to purchase a product? How many items do they order at one session?

SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/customer-relationship-management-strategies-part-four-strategies-and-case-study-17787/

A New Customer Relationship Management Framework

Simply put, the business ecosystem changed dramatically and for good about three years ago (five minutes in fashionista time). It shifted focus from corporate to customer, and the location of value changed with it. Where value had historically been located in the products and services produced by companies, it is now located in the value produced by the customer. The driver's seat is now occupied by that customer, whether the service is business-to-business or business-to-consumer or government-to-citizen. Ultimately, value now lies in the hands of the individual customer, and it is up to the company to both come to terms with that as the way the economy now runs, and to find ways of receiving that value from the customers through the provision of value to the customer.

Think I'm wrong? Look around you at what's successful these days. You hear tell of The Long Tail—niche markets that are successful over time by capturing the volume of individual responses through the creation of a highly specific market built around a personal desire of one sort or another. It's why you see a proliferation of successful mini-Starbucksian types of businesses. Some of the more colorful examples:

1. There are dessert-only restaurants in New York (US) and Barcelona (Spain), among other places, that have high-end desserts only on the menus.
2. There is a concept of fractional super car ownership that allows you, for some yearly sum at different levels, to use Porsches, or Bentleys, or Ferraris for weeks at a time, depending on what level you purchase for the year. It's the ultimate chichi car ownership model.
3. According to the author of The Long Tail, Wired's Chris Anderson, 25 percent of purchases at Amazon are from non-traditional booksellers who would otherwise have no chance of selling their books.

We can go on, but this is merely one representation of the transformation of the desires of the customer.

Peppers & Rogers have a different take on customer value. They call it "return on customer," which they see as a metric and set of performance indicators that are a true measure of a successful business. Their recent hit book Return on Customer makes it quite clear that whether or not you agree with their specific metrics, we now live in an age where the customer, not the company, determines the value.

What Is that Value?

The irony is that in the "old days" of CRM, you'd think that the value was determined purely financially. Bottom- and top-line stuff. Revenue, sales volume increases, margin and profit increases, number of products from your company owned by the customer, and so on. This is not the case in the age of the new customer. The customer's idea of what is valuable and the company's may be quite different.

What customers are looking for is "meaningful value." In other words, something that they think is worth it. Worth what? Something for which it's worth being advocates for your company. But we'll get into that in a short while. Customers are looking for a great experience with your company—an experience that is owned by them. They are looking to your company, not just as a manufacturer of products and services, but as an aggregator of experiences that they both drive themselves and co-own with you. This means they expect a certain level of transparency—also known as honesty—from you.

Don't underestimate this, because your underestimation of "truth, but not advertising" can be the deal-breaker that drives your customer from you. It is the reason that three years ago, no discernable percentage of companies were running business blogs, and that now 8 percent are, with 55 percent intending to, according to multiple studies recently released. Because honesty no longer lies (double entendre there) with the marketing department. Honesty is a corporate effort at conversation with a customer from all employees. Marketing in the way that we knew it is not as useful as it once was, which means that traditional CRM ways of looking at marketing (campaign management and the like) need some rethinking around the use of the new means of communication that customers are demanding, and around the new approaches to marketing taken by some of the big players like Procter and Gamble (P&G).

What do they do? They understand the value of intimacy with the customer—truth, and then some. For example, P&G has a network of 600,000 members they call Vocalpoint. Know what it consists of? Mothers. Yes, mamas, but with a unique twist. Each of the mommies has a social network of at least twenty-five other moms. Multiply that, readers, and what do you get? A minimum of fifteen million reachable targets that are living within trusted networks. So if Prime Momma in Network #33 says to Mommy #52 that they should take a look at this P&G product sample which Prime Momma thinks is really cool, Mommy #52 does and tells #53 about it too. Why shouldn't she? Prime Momma is a trusted friend.

This all works because P&G gets what the new customer demands and what this customer and potential advocate sees as value. Thus, they understand what the new CRM is. Read these quotes from P&G chief executive officer (CEO) A.G. Lafley real close, because they are an exact representation as to why we need a new framework for CRM going forward:

"We have to create a great experience every time you touch the brand, and the design is a really big part of creating the experience and the emotion. We try to make a customer's experience better, but better in her terms."

"I think it's value that rules the world. There's an awful lot of evidence across an awful lot of categories that consumers will pay more for better design, better performance, better quality, better value, and better experiences."

This latter comment was a direct counter to Wal-Mart's philosophy that "price rules the world."

Ultimately, what I'm saying here is that there is a new breed of customers in town who are both undeniable in their formidable presence, and who have demands that are non-negotiable. They are social customers who are as likely to trash your company as to be advocates for you. They are customers who are part of what Springwise likes to call "generation C"—creative, connected, and content-driven—regardless of which actual generation they belong to. It is the Blackberry users who use the device for personal stuff too and take it home at night. It is the kids who text message their buds, instant message (IM) them, or even call them. It is the people who look at what you do and think cool. But it is also the people who use the Internet to get the word out about what bad service a company provides. They get that "diss" to absolute strangers who automatically trust the bad comments and spread it to others—even though the only thing that you know about the person sending is that their e-mail handle is rabidbatman@robinzonked.com. To both counter the latter, and encourage the "cool" response and create an advocate, what you have to provide as a business is an experience with you, your products, and your services that distinguishes you from your competitors who can provide similar products and services as cheaply and as easily as you—something that your customer is fully aware of, by the way. Think about it. You're a customer too. Don't you know that? Don't you think—I loved that hotel? or I hated that hotel?—and that can color your perception of an entire vacation. Imagine that thinking going on about all products, services, and companies these days.

That means that you have to differentiate yourself by providing customers with a personalized experience that they can find some meaningful value in. And that meaningful value could just be the satisfaction of outright "coolness."

Think that's an overstatement? After all, it's not easily metrically determinable. Well, think of this. A study that was commissioned in a joint effort by Intel and Toray Ultrasuede found that 76 percent of the survey respondents not only looked at someone's technology, but at the style of it—and that style was a critical factor in technology choice. Now, while this study indicates something about the new customer, Intel and Toray Ultrasuede's answer to the results indicates something about uncreative thinking—an ultrasuede-covered laptop. Sigh and Ugh.

But the underlying research is both sound and important. What is meaningful value to a customer can be emotional. What these customers want are the tools to fashion and sculpt their own experiences with you.

Disney Destinations Marketing, the vacation arm of Disney, made what they call a small change in their CRM acronym a few months ago. They started calling it CMR—"customer-managed relationships." They made what that meant clear when their spokesperson said, "CMR is our version of CRM—just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our guests invite us into their lives and ultimately manage our presence/relationship with them." While I think that's a lot more than a slight nuance, it indicates that there are a number of companies that know the new business models and especially the customer strategies, and thus, the processes that are determinate in the execution of those strategies now have to be built around features and functions that have some engaged customer value embedded—whether the feature or function is internal or external.

So a new framework for CRM has to be built. One that says, "we recognize that customer demands are different than they were; that customers want to be more engaged in the creation of personalized experiences with the companies they choose to collaborate with." In order for the company to get value from the customer, they need to both create an advocate and not create a verbal terrorist. The company has to be both a manufacturer of goods and services, and an aggregator of experiences that provides the tools and environment for the customer they need to make those experiences excellent and "cool." That means that blogs and social networks and user communities and cell phones and mobile device platforms and podcasts and you-name-it are all part of the customer strategy that wins during this part of the twenty-first century. The new framework for this now needs to be created. If it's not time, it's too late.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-new-customer-relationship-management-framework-twenty-first-century-necessity-or-blowin-in-the-wind-18726/

Amdocs Overhauls Its Marketing

Amdocs (NASDAQ: DOX), is a leading provider of billing systems, customer care, and support for the communications industry in North America, Europe, and the rest of the world. A global company with revenue of about $1.8 billion (USD) in fiscal 2004, Amdocs employs over 9,500 IT professionals and serves customers in more than 40 countries around the world.

Headquartered in Ra'anana, Israel, Amdocs has long been the leader in the world of telecommunications billing, by long supplying operations support software (OSS) used by telecommunications service providers to deliver voice, data, and wireless services to their customers. OSS is a generic term for a suite of software programs that enable an enterprise to monitor, analyze, and manage a network system. The term was originally applied to communications service providers (CSP), referring to a management system that controlled telephone and computer networks. However, the term has since been applied to the business world in general to mean a system that supports an organization's network operations. To that end, Amdocs' software includes modules for customer service, billing, sales, and audits, while it also offers sales and publishing software for developing print and on-line directories. It is a technology company that engages in the provision of product-driven information system solutions to major telecommunications companies.

The company's product offerings now include a library of OSS, whose core elements include customer resource management (CRM), order management, call rating, invoice calculation, bill formatting, collections, fraud management and directory publishing services, while its managed services include information technology (IT) outsourcing, application outsourcing, and business process outsourcing (BPO), particularly for customer service and data center operations. In fact, a large proportion of Amdocs' 2004 revenue came from managed services, where the company saw continued strength in its directory services business and enhanced relationships with important existing customers. For instance, following the completed acquisition of Certen from Bell Canada in mid-2003, Amdocs took over the managed services responsibilities for Bell, Existing managed services agreement with Bell extends through December 2010. Amdocs has also continued to develop an integrated billing platform to replace legacy systems built on a product-by-product basis. Thus it has further contributing to Bell's productivity improvement goals and enabling Bell to deliver on its one integrated bill commitment to its customers.

This is Part One of a three-part note.

Part Two will discuss market strategy.

Part Three will cover alliances, challenges and make user recommendations.

Amdocs Products

Amdocs Ensemble suite of products encompasses several key customer care, billing and order management systems (CC&B systems) application areas, such as customer care; order management; event processing; invoicing; and fraud management. Moreover, through the acquisition of a former CRM leader Clarify in 2001 (see Clarity of Vision: Clarify Sold to Amdocs by Nortel), Amdocs also became a noteworthy player in the CRM and call center areas, so that, in terms of the OSS side of a communication customer or a CSP, most data of any effect is captured and managed by an Amdocs solution. To that end, Amdocs ClarifyCRM product offers solutions that help companies better perform and manage selling processes across multiple sales channels. The major suite, Amdocs ClarifyCRM Service and Support, offers solutions spanning support centers, contact centers, and self-service solutions, although the product offers certain marketing and analytics capabilities too.

Another related product, Amdocs Enabler, provides flexible, real time rating and billing for all voice, data, content, and commerce services, by offering integrated on-line and off-line charging. It also provides a single product to support both prepaid-postpaid convergence and wire-line and wireless convergence. Enabler is pre-integrated with Amdocs ClarifyCRM, which will coordinate the integration of future product upgrades, since Enabler's functionality can be extended through pre-integration with value-added Amdocs products.

In 2003, Amdocs launched major releases of its flagship products. These releases introduced out-of-the-box, productized billing and CRM integration, enabling easier implementation of the products as well as with third-party and legacy applications. This functionality has provided customers with the potential to achieve integrated customer management regardless of their current operating environment, and these releases also provided additional functionality that allows Amdocs' customers to drive profitability within their businesses. For example, Enabler 5 supports new revenue streams and business models with advanced on-line charging capabilities and it supports multi-market and multi-national operations, all on a single platform. On the other hand, ClarifyCRM 12 introduced advanced user interface (UI) technology that delivers more real time, relevant, and actionable customer information to the service agent's desktop, thereby transforming a high-volume call center into a more efficient and effective multi-channel customer contact center.

Amdocs further evolved its CRM offering in 2003 with the acquisition of the technology assets the bankrupt Exchange Applications Inc. (Xchange, see Xchange Adds to the List of CRM Point Solutions' Casualties). Now re-branded as part of the Amdocs ClarifyCRM suite of applications, the campaign management and real time decision-making capabilities obtained through this acquisition complemented Amdocs' traditional strengths in operational CRM, thereby delivering a more complete, closed-loop customer management.

Even during 2002, while battling to secure new finances, Xchange surprisingly managed to build a real time engine to deliver targeted promotions-based capability to detect important customer events and behaviors from transactional data throughout multiple marketing channels within an enterprise. In early 2003 the company announced the release of its former Xchange 9 browser-based suite that enables marketers to automatically trigger an appropriate communication to the customer immediately after they exhibit a behavior representing a cross-sell, up-sell, or retention opportunity, thus answering the question "when" to initiate a marketing interaction.

Further, the Xchange 9 EDM (Event Driven Marketing) Option allowed users to observe data from multiple sources within the enterprise, look for changes to the "state" of the customer, and change direct marketing via the Xchange 9 platform. This development is in sharp contrast to using traditional data mining tools or writing complex structured query language -based (SQL) queries to leverage historical information and to produce predictive models long after the marketing opportunity has past. Nevertheless, the former Xchange applications have since hardly promoted Amdocs as an integrated OSS for CSPs. The reason being that within the marketing automation (MA) market, Amdoc's capabilities have, at best been, described as only "adequate", not "exciting" or "leading".

Amdocs Product Group

Principal among Amdocs' product highlights in 2004 was the formation of the Amdocs Products Group. This is a new department that should bring a more cohesive approach to developing and managing Amdoc's product portfolio and build greater integration into the software. Efforts planned for fiscal 2005 in product development and management will be another major step in enhancing the company's ability to help its customers implement their own integrated customer management strategy.

It appears that the Amdocs' acquisitions have been paying dividends as the company now intends to go to market with a more holistic message dubbed Integrated Customer Management (ICM). What appears to be a new corporate personality actually represents a fundamental shift in the Amdocs strategy. It is moving away from positioning itself as a vendor providing best-in-class CSP billing systems with a CRM suite on the side. Now the company offers an integrated business processes with the customer as the focal point.

Its portfolio now offers an appealing proposition with the built-in ability to help service providers move toward the ICM vision—one product at a time or all at once. With the acquisition of XACCT Technologies in 2004, Amdocs was able to add network data management capabilities to its product offering. By adding XACCT mediation system to pre-integrated components such as self-service, billing, CRM, order management, and partner relationship management (PRM), Amdocs owns possibly the most comprehensive portfolio currently available to telecommunications companies.

With increased investment in research and development (R&D) to $126.4 million (USD) in 2004 versus $119.3 million (USD) spent in 2003, 2004 product launches included new versions of

* Amdocs ClarifyCRM, which offers improved performance, scalability and availability, as demonstrated through recent benchmark tests using the HP-UNIX and BEA WebLogic platforms.

* Amdocs PRM, which enables CSPs to (relatively) cost-effectively deliver a selection of new products and services and to reduce the cost of managing multiple content and commerce partners in order to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and to promote new revenue streams.

* Amdocs Commerce Payments, which now has more advanced features to allow providers to monetize third-party content and commerce services and increase end user satisfaction and loyalty.



SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/amdocs-overhauls-its-marketing-18092/

Customer Relationship Management: Evolution, Not Revolution

Choosing a new customer relationship management (CRM) solution can be onerous for anyone saddled with this task. But the process of choosing a solution doesn't have to be time-consuming and tedious. Nor should it cause major upheaval in an enterprise's operations, creating significant inconvenience for users. The last thing any manager wants is apathy—or even mutiny—from disgruntled employees “forced” to use an application that doesn't suit their needs or that is too complex to be adopted quickly.

Instead, a CRM solution should be implemented so that users are fully supported and feel that the tools at hand are helping them to get the job done, not adding an extra element of responsibility to their workdays. What you don't want is hand-to-hand combat when trying to encourage employees to use new applications, as lack of user buy-in is one of the most common reasons for CRM project failure.

The application you choose should, in fact, increase efficiency. And hand in hand with efficiency, you expect either a reduction in costs, or an increase in profit. Ideally, you'll get a quantifiable return on what can be a significant investment.

But First, What Is CRM?

CRM is a process of improving a business's relationships with its customers, using software applications that target the requirements of the business's processes. CRM can strengthen these relationships in a number of ways. Typically, CRM applications fulfill one of three key functionalities related to managing customer information: marketing, sales, or service. Software modules are generally broken down into four functional areas: sales automation, marketing automation, customer service and support, and a reporting and analysis tool. Some CRM packages are comprehensive, meaning that they incorporate aspects of all four functions.

So how do you know if you need a comprehensive package?

This partly depends on whether your enterprise is small-to-medium, or whether it is a huge national industry or multinational corporation. It also depends on how many aspects of your customer relationships you think could do with a little revolutionizing—or “evolutionizing.” And finally, it depends on your company's budget.

What Are the Features of CRM?

In order for CRM to effect positive change in your company, its features should speak to all activities involving customer interactions. But don't stop at thinking this means only face-to-face interactions. CRM should include features that take into account all ways the customer comes in contact with the company—before, during, and after a sale. Therefore, advertising campaigns and customer complaints are just as important as that friendly smile offered to customers when they take their purchases and walk out of the store. All activities should emphasize to customers how much the company values them—and, for a more personalized experience, how well the company knows them. So that when you thank customers and invite them to “come again,” there's a much better chance that they will.

CRM can include any of the following features:

* call management
* customer management
* service issues management
* knowledge exchange management
* sales force activities
* marketing campaign management
* sale lead tracking
* marketing analysis and forecasting
* database storage

Packages that are tailored separately for the sales, marketing, or service aspects of CRM have additional features. Customer service and support automation, for example, may have such features as call routing, contact center sales support, and tools for measuring customer satisfaction. Marketing features might detail sales activities and time management, and allow for analyzing and reporting on sales opportunities.

But How Are These Features Going to Benefit My Business?

One simple way to sum up the benefits of CRM is this: better relationships with your customers. But, this is likely self-evident from the very name of the software—though of course “manage” is not necessarily synonymous with “improve.” What you really need to know is how exactly the many features of CRM can restructure and improve your relationships with clients.

Here are some key benefits:

* Data management and analysis tools help you to track customer preferences and to anticipate needs based on individual purchase histories, over time and according to changes in the marketplace.

* Marketing automation helps you create targeted campaigns based on those anticipated needs.

* Costs are reduced as a result of more efficient post-purchase support and service.

* As a stable base of satisfied repeat customers is created, more time can be spent on expanding the client base.

* Profitability and revenue can increase as a result of improved relationships with clients both old and new.

* New software can be merged with a business's existing platform or with other previously installed software applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), sales force automation (SFA), and e-mail programs.

* Operations can be streamlined to increase competitive advantage and to cut costs.

* Customer loyalty is boosted by making the enterprise customer-centric instead of product-centric.

* Customers are able to report on how they experience the enterprise.

And the Number One Benefit of Implementing a CRM Solution Is …

Quantifying all the benefits is the easy part, but the number one benefit is really up to you to determine. What exactly do you want a CRM package to do for your business? It is essential to perform a thorough comparative analysis to find the solution that provides the benefit that best meets your needs.

What Industries Can Use CRM, and What Are the Advantages?

CRM can be used by a broad spectrum of industries and enterprises. Applications have been designed for specific domains, including aerospace, automotive, call centers, real estate, telecommunications, financial and banking, energy, government, legal services, manufacturing, health care and pharmaceutical, retail, transportation, and travel.

* Financial and insurance markets
This solution includes features of comprehensive CRM packages, but is designed to help financial and insurance markets with their specific client bases. Among its features and functions are policy tracking and investment tracking in order to enhance client databases. Software from some vendors might allow customer data to be consolidated, permit better communication between branches, and reduce staff training costs.

* Real estate
CRM for this sector helps vendors to improve customer relationships by capturing online leads, increasing the volume of higher-quality leads, performing personalized electronic marketing campaigns, and automating various administrative processes such as prospecting, quoting, and financing.

* Telecommunications
Solutions specifically designed for this industry can help reduce churn rates, generate new sales opportunities, and increase customer retention. In an era when the number of competitors seems to keep pace with the number of services provided, CRM can allow companies to bundle their services, thereby reducing cost as well as preserving an evermore fickle client base.

* Travel and transportation
Among the many industry-specific functions of this CRM solution, automated campaign management and SFA can help businesses consolidate client data and improve passenger experiences. As a result, increased productivity, higher traffic volumes, and reduced costs become the benefits for this sector.

* Health care and pharmaceutical
For the pharmaceutical industry, a CRM application can facilitate improved sales presentations, better promotion of product information, and better collaboration with physicians regarding product market demographics.

* Government
Yes, even in a domain that is not profit-motivated and that prefers the word “citizens” over “customers,” CRM applications can provide benefits. Across the board, government departments are constantly striving to improve “customer service” and overall user satisfaction, and can do so with a CRM application that merges services and permits quicker response.


SOURCE:
http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/customer-relationship-management-evolution-not-revolution-19108/