by Vamsi Krishna Paramjyothi
My previous post on ICRM, "How ICRM can aid in decision support for enhancing customer relationships" would have raised a few questions like, “How does ICRM differ from ACRM?”. Though they sound similar, there is a huge difference, ICRM is a framework where as ACRM is a technology. ICRM stands for Intelligence CRM as it derives customer related intelligence.
Continue reading "How is Intelligence CRM (ICRM) different from Analytical CRM (ACRM)?" »
Confinement has always been meted with a rebellion to move out free. The desire to be your own boss, to plan your own schedule or to work on your own terms has always been inherent in every living species (I did not want to state and confine these desires only for humans).
Continue reading "Mobile Applications on Laptop or Handheld; And The Winner is…." »
My previous post (Investing in Customers, during Recession) discussed how successful companies tend to invest in customers during an economic downturn. While this is a proven strategy, the execution of it is often plagued with practical limitations of the ever-shrinking discretionary budget spends and similar such roadblocks that are characteristics of a cautionary, recession-hit landscape.
However, several tactics employed by companies, driven by the demands of a recessionary economy are emerging as genuine CRM trends, with reasonable longevity to survive being called a fad.
When it comes to CRM, it is mostly positioned or hyped as a technology solution and Customers invest significantly to implement the state-of-the-art and best-of-the-breed CRM Technology Solutions (such as CRM Package, Contact Center System, Business Intelligence, Master Data Management, to name a few), however, if all these investments are made assuming that just technology alone (without the human touch), will improve customer satisfaction, we would be wrong.
Continue reading "Customer Relationship Management, with a human touch...and not just technology" »
by Vamsi Krishna Paramjyothi
The market today is mature and highly competitive with several players, providing similar services at competitive prices with new products being released into the market in short intervals. Competition and the demanding customer, who is willing to shift to another product or service provider, unless his /her wants aren’t met readily, are giving companies a tough time.
Continue reading "How ICRM can aid in decision support for enhancing customer relationships" »
By Madhukar N.S.M.
You might feel that the word “federated” is generally associated to data models and database designs. Federated MDM Data Domains means a union of “disparate" data without which the enterprise MDM hub is incomplete. I will take the example of a Customer MDM enterprise hub and elaborate further.
Continue reading "Federated MDM Data Domains - A Perspective" »
By Shashank Shekhar Shukla
Day 4 was a half day with the SW Universe closing at 1 pm. The solution showcase opened at 9 am and the solution demos were presented till 12 pm. Post that the 1 hour time was utilized in interacting with other attendees and learning about upcoming products. The Infosys team had another successful session on Test Automation. This session generated a lot of interest.
Continue reading "Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 4" »
By Shashank Shekhar Shukla
Day 3 was a day of intense activity with the solution showcase open from 9 am till 6 pm. This was interspersed with Enablement sessions around new product launches from HP and track sessions from various HP clients. I got the opportunity to get trained on some of the latest HP products like HP QC 10.0, PC 9.5 & Business Availability Center 9.0. I also attended a few sessions around Performance Testing. The Infosys team had a track session in partnership with UBS which was very well received.
By Shashank Shekhar Shukla
Day 2 at the event comprised of the HP SW Universe Mainstage and the Solution showcase opening. Infosys team participated in the Mainstage event and shared their inputs on partnership with HP. Post the mainstage the Infosys team held meetings with key HP executives.
By Shashank Shekhar Shukla
I am currently at Las Vegas, attending the HP SW Universe, 2009. I am seeing a lot of buzz in this event and its quite amazing to see the passion of the attendees. Testing automation is definitely the in-thing and I have been meeting a lot of people who are passionate about this subject. I wanted to share with you all the happenings at this event and will be posting a daily note, so here goes my note for day 1 (June 16th)
"Software as a Service is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand. SaaS software vendors may host the application on their own web servers or download the application to the consumer device, disabling it after use or after the on-demand contract expires. The on-demand function may be handled internally to share licenses within a firm or by a third-party application service provider (ASP) sharing licenses between firms."[1]
SaaS originally got off the ground with customer relationship management and human resources applications. But recent trends have shown SaaS spread its reach into areas like online backup, Web conferencing, collaboration, and IT systems management. But the reach of SaaS into Enterprise Solution integration and Business Intelligence has been limited so far.
Recently I was watching the movie “21” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_(2008_film)) in sitcom, where students from MIT including a professor was able to use probability and sign language to win millions of dollars from multiple casino houses based out in Las Vegas. The movie featured usage of technology and manual investigators to help resolve the “identity” of the fraudsters using data points, and finally resulted in each of them being caught. So what is Identity resolution? As an organization it is an ideal objective to reach the strategic level in an MDM implementation. Identity resolution is basically driven out of the strategic usage of MDM implementation. Identity resolution means able to truly identify an individual based on his/her relationship.
Continue reading "Identity resolution – Strategic goals for an MDM implementation" »
By Ravi Agarwal
In whatever we do as a business, the end goal is to get a happier customer resulting in more business. The primary element here is to know exactly what the customer wants / would want in the future – every year from now on say for the next 10 + years and be the first player in the market to lure the customer with that need / product / service. It is in this context that it becomes important to look at convergence keeping the customer perspective in mind. The key business drivers are around customer centricity, synergies and brand value.
Marketing Effectiveness - a term that’s conspicuous with its absence in most organizations is gaining importance in today’s recession hit world. Marketing departments, traditionally a cost centre, are being asked to objectively demonstrate the impact of their marketing activities.
Traditionally the measurement of marketing activities’ output has been done through metrics like brand awareness, campaigns and events responses etc. Due to the subjective nature of these measures, the task of evaluating marketing department’s performance becomes difficult and quite often, organizations end up either aligning marketing goals to sales or setting subjective targets for various activities. The problem with both these approaches is that the organizations are never able to ascertain the exact dollar value that various marketing activities contribute towards the top line as well as the bottom line.
Managers across the industries are faced with some fundamental questions:
Continue reading "Are you able to measure your Marketing department’s effectiveness?" »
In today’s recession-infected world, customer-retention has become one of the key factor’s for organization survival. A few organizations have thus renewed their focus on leveraging/enhancing their existing CRM applications to derive and provide more value to their customers. However, the long-drawn market slump has forced organizations to cut-down their discretionary and non-discretionary IT spending. The focus for any new CRM implementation/enhancement is thus on squeezing the overall cost and reducing the deployment time.
Continue reading "Business Process Testing - The future of package testing ?" »
I’ve had a hectic & eventful last few weeks, studying call center processes & agents in different types of call centers. I wanted to share some conclusions with this CRM community and take some feedback (and also break a chain of Customer Experience posts from my side!). This post is going to be less about the processes and more about the agents…
‘Average talk time’ and ‘Service levels’ continue to be the most significant measures of an agent’s performance. I have to jump into an analogy immediately… these measures are akin to a sales rep diligently tracking ‘SG&A’ as a key metric. These are certainly important & quantifiable metrics but need to be higher up in the pyramid. Levers to achieve good service levels and low SG&As are way broader than what a call agent or a sales rep can significantly influence. For a sales rep, the single biggest measure has been and will always be ‘Top-Line’. This, very clearly, is their raison d'être. I don’t know if we will ever achieve unanimity on this but what is the call agent’s raison d'être?
Continue reading "Empowering the Next Generation Call Agent" »
It is interesting to see how improvements in capabilities of SaaS CRM applications together with generic developments in SaaS space are impacting Total Cost of Ownership figures for SaaS CRM applications – negatively in some cases. One can see that happening at least in the following areas: Functionality, Integration Capabilities & Resource Availability.
“Customer” – looks like the most coveted entity in a CRM application. Isn’t it? Of course that is the back-bone of any CRM application, but what if I say that its database is often the primary reason for many CRM implementations failures and lack of user adoption. Sounds intriguing, but it’s true. Turn the clock behind and sense that as users or consultants, have we not found it to be one of the most neglected or maligned entity in the system. Probably yes….
Continue reading "Social Networks in Business and Commerce - Is it Unprecedented?" »
Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?" »
If, during economic growth you ‘reward’ customers for greater usage and spending, you ‘invest’ in them when there is an economic downturn.
The classic principles of Customer Loyalty seem to go haywire during an economic downturn. The loyal customer who was your advocate and evangelist seems to have switched his allegiance, the increasing profits customers were to provide as shown in your Customer Lifetime Value projections may show negative trends and all your attractive marketing offers designed to create the ‘wow’ is showing poor returns. Confusing times, indeed!
…But as it is said, ‘from confusion comes opportunity’
Continue reading "Investing in Customers, during Recession" »
In the previous part, we have seen the advantages of Open Source CRM over the traditional CRM model. In this concluding part, we will be looking at what are the factors that make Open Source CRM a viable option for organizations in comparison to Hosted models in the long run and also look at some of the uncertainties surrounding the Open Source CRM model that act as a blockade in its acceptance in the CRM market space.
Continue reading "Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 3." »
Fully fledged Master Data Management (MDM) packages have been in the market space since the turn of the decade and many fortune 500 companies have implemented the MDM solution to achieve tremendous value within their industry domain. I have been in the MDM Consulting stream for the last couple of years but still realize the need to evangelize the need for an MDM solution among peers within the CRM/EAI/BI domain space. Many of the renowned implementation using matured products such as CRM, EAI and BI has put forth a view that the respective products within various domains can indeed be customized to meet the MDM specific requirements. This is predominantly wrong for the very reason that just because each product stack (CRM/EA/BI) can fulfill a partial subset of requirements within the MDM domain, the central core of an MDM suite (360 view of customer including Data stewardship process to manage the golden copy of the customer) cannot be customized on a CRM/BI/EAI product stack. This blog helps in acting as a myth buster for some of the common misconception around CRM/EAI/BI products fulfilling the MDM requirements.
In my previous post, we looked at why Open Source CRM can be looked at as an alternate to Hosted CRM models. In this part of the post, we can look at the adv and disadvantages of the hosted models and how open source CRM could be a viable alternative to overcome the challenges posed by the Hosted CRM market space.
Continue reading "Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 2." »
True, we are going through unprecedented era. There have been feelers that the US economy has been able to overcome the tide of recession. Goldman Sachs was able to report a profit (http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/story.html?id=1492381), this quarter, though they had to resort to usage of a $10 billion bail-out package from the US Treasury, as late as October 2008. This may lead to more banks trying to balance and juggle their financials to declare a profit, the subsequent quarters. So what does this have to do with SAAS? Well everything! Most companies who operate in the SAAS space have been failing to pass on their operational efficiencies to the client, leading to the client aggressively trying to cut the cost outlay for managing these hosted applications. Clients have evaluated switching over to a new vendor for the hosted application or have tried to bring in-house the functionalities delivered by these hosted applications. The SAAS players have aggressively tried to reduce the per user cost and has offered slab based bundling price to keep the exodus of their current clientele list.
1) Wholesale Product Catalogue Management - Creating and maintaing these new wholesale product catalogues for Retail Service Providers and ensuring the synchronisation of these product/services between RSPs and WSP systems.2) PartnerRelationship Management with these RSPs who can make our services penetrate in remote areas and in areas where the presence is less. Handling these partners is an impacted area.3) Product fulfillment of RSP Customers When RSPs sell the white label products in their brand, the corresponding product on WSP needs to be fulfilled/provided and track that order to closure, this impacts the CRM system and related integration on WSP side. Also B2B integration with the RSP systems.4) Assurance to RSP Customers Ensuring that if a customer problem arises because of the systems (not only IT) on wholesale service providers side identifying those situations and providing solutions to the customer and also informing the RSP about the progress of resolution is WSPs another important area.
By definition Master data is core data which does not change frequently. The very objective of Master Data Management is to consolidate master data, cleanse, enrich, and publish to consuming applications, like CRM, ERP, Data Warehouses, etc. This leads to a belief that Master Data Hubs should only have master data like customer, product, assets etc and there should not be any (or limited) transactional data in MDM Hub. E.g. Sales Orders, Opportunities, Service Requests, Invoices.
Contrary to the above, MDM vendors like Oracle are offering MDM Hub license with additional options of integrating Sales Hub, Service Hub, Activity Hub with MDM Hub. IBM and Siperian too have a very flexible Data Model and their out-of-the-box data model could be extended to include transactional data elements. What are the real implications of this? Would the Organizations that are implementing MDM or have plans to do so in their IT roadmap, be better served by extending transactional data elements in MDM Hub?
The answer could be both yes or no and depends on the Organizations’ Business Case for MDM. Moreover, it needs good consulting proficiency on the part of SI’s to help clients refrain from establishing incorrect expectations from MDM. MDM is not supposed to replace any existing transactional application; it is to consolidate the master data from various application silos and to aid the business functions that need accurate representation of master data. Expectations from MDM like ‘Ability to raise customer invoices’ or ‘Ability to Create Sales Orders / Service Requests’ should be laid to rest, even while preparing/validating the Business Case. Usually, during the initial assessment of MDM programs, we have seen a huge list of master data (customer, product etc) related pain points being set forth by client IT after duly collating such pain points from various departments. While it may be prudent to analyze the list and recommend solution to all pain points, the customer is better served if the non-MDM pain points are identified and an alternate solution proposed to address those.
This being said, MDM application may still have the Sales, Service and Activity related details but it should only facilitate establishing the accurate customer profile to help with customer segmentation, prepare target audience for campaigns, various reporting purposes etc.
The MDM space continues to be dynamic and as the leading vendors (Oracle, IBM, SAP) and niche players (Siperian, Initiate etc) carry on with their roadmap, we will witness quite a few new products being introduced and in relatively newer domains E.g. Site Management (to streamline supply chain) etc. In addition to this, the concept of Enterprise MDM, or a true ‘multi-entity MDM’ has already been widely recognized and the newer versions of leading packages should see support for both ‘party’ and ‘product’ based entities. This would make MDM consulting even more exciting and would call for greater refinement in MDM solution offerings E.g. Data Modelling, Data Rationalization, Consolidation etc.
I am currently working on a proposal where a prospective client wants an estimate for the above. Preparing such an estimate is always more challenging because the client needs are generally not met by an off-the-shelf package meant for a different business scenario.
Continue reading "Implementing Royalty Solutions using an Incentive Compensation System" »
We are not new to receiving unwanted calls from the various marketing agents selling everything from banking products to holiday packages. This kind of cold calling to acquire new customers is simply based on a list of potential customers with hardly any planning and profiling involved. A more mature sales organization or service organization will engage a planning methodology to reach out to customers. Call Planning is an essential task in CRM strategy, where the need is to constantly reach out for a wide range of purposes including acquiring new customers, developing existing customers, after sales service calls, survey calls etc.
Traditional, manual, volume based calling is time consuming, low in efficiency and high in cost. While traditional methods could have served the purpose thus far, the data that an organization has accrued over a period of time has made it impossible to consider all parameters for planning call activity for a representative, say, for a period of one month. Organizations have spent huge amounts in storage to store ‘gazillion’ bytes of data that they have collected for a customer. Harnessing this huge amount of data requires IT solutions backed by strong strategy. Companies have realized that it is impossible to manually plan for hundreds of sales and service associates over multiple geographies. Business rules change way too often in this dynamic era and manual efforts simply can’t catch up. Absence of feedback loop doesn’t help the overall planning process either. As a result, more time is spent planning than calling.
Continue reading "Make your calls count through intelligent call planning" »
Tomorrow is my marriage anniversary and here I am, 750 miles away from my wife, secure in the thought, that, thanks to the sophisticated systems of online retailers I can wow her with a nice bouquet of roses in a jiffy. Well I logged in very early in the morning to one of India’s most reputed online retailers and spotted that lovely bouquet which would make my wife swoon, and quickly transferred it to my shopping cart, and then, clicked on "proceed" and was connected to my bank, after feeding in the account details and pressing confirm I got the approval instantaneously.
Open source software (OSS) is defined as computer software for which the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that meets the Open Source Definition or that is in the public domain. [1] This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified forms. Many a time one does not have a clear understanding of what an Open Source Solution is, in relation to the Proprietary solutions available in the market today. One needs to understand that each of these have their own advantages and disadvantages in them.
Traditional CRM Packages have been relying primarily on 2 basic models of hosting applications i.e. On-Demand model and On-Premise models. Open Source products have come to the fore over the last couple of years with various vendors like Redhat, Apache, MySQL etc coming up with some extremely customer friendly products. This has resulted in open source taking an influential stand in the Enterprise Solutions domain with emphasis on the CRM vertical space. They have been able to challenge the Traditional CRM market by providing products that suit Enterprise Integration coupled with support offerings.
Continue reading "Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 1." »
