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/