CRM Solutions

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to CRM Solutions and Customer relationship management software and products. Providing customer service is vital to maintaining successful business relationships. Accurate and timely information provided in a professional manner is the key to any business and service operation. Our CRM software application TELEMATION, was developed with this in mind. But the ability to change is just as important in this ever changing business environment. Telemation call center software was designed from the very beginning for this environment. Many call center managers, with unique and changing requirements, have chosen and continue to use our CRM software as their solution of choice. Our contact center CRM solution is ideally suited for call center service bureaus.

Mike Fitzgerald argues that companies must effectively communicate the benefits - and the pitfalls - of customer relationship management.

Is it guilt? Or simply a failure to understand the real business issues?

Once again, technically-oriented enterprise software vendors have become preoccupied with return on investment (ROI). They even use the German courts to dispute claims and counterclaims.

It's sad that customer relationship management (CRM) has become the domain of lawyers instead of a vehicle for corporate transformation.

The team leader of one of the independent research groups we use put his finger on the core issue at a debriefing last week. "Some technologists have difficulty understanding the difference between genuine ROI and business case justification," he said.

And, of course, it is business imperatives that drive really strategic CRM: a deployment that reaches beyond hardware, beyond software, beyond business process reformation, to embrace the people who drive enterprise transformation.

The success of enterprise transformation cannot be measured with a simple ROI calculation. But it can be measured with a holistic set of forward-looking metrics which address the interests of all the corporate stakeholders, from customers through to employees and shareholders.

Our ebusiness adoption model shows that many CRM initiatives have emerged as the result of a series of piecemeal initiatives, each project addressing only a few elements of the total challenge of building a truly customer-centric organisation.

Because they are tactical, ground-up initiatives, they lack a complete vision; the strategies are unambitious and the potential commercial benefits go unrealised.

The decision to use CRM to make a business totally customer-centric is complex and far-reaching.

Executed effectively, truly strategic CRM will have a positive impact on nearly 90 per cent of the key performance indicators by which a typical organisation is managed. Yet organisations intent on seizing the CRM opportunity report difficulty in achieving the hoped-for returns.

Directors have to confront the widespread damage caused by confused data ownership, system incompatibilities, information duplication, and the knowledge gaps present in the traditional information archipelago.

But there is a way to drive the CRM initiative forward from the boardroom through a set of enterprise transformation methodologies:

• Market/brand review
• Review of market and channel interfaces
• Key interactions/customer contact centre
• Customer contact programme design
• Integrated communications
• People and change issues
• Customer knowledge audit
• Measurement and review.