Customer Relationship Management

This weekend's Super Bowl XLIII between the Arizona Cardinals and the Pittsburgh Steelers promises to be an interesting match. The Cardinals were not expected to go this far in the league. They won the N.F.C. title and will go up against the A.F.C. champions Pittsburgh Steelers on Feb. 1 in Tampa, Fla.

Sports is today more than just a spectator event. The management of sports is a multi-million dollar industry, Customers range from the advertisers to the supporters to even the peripheral service providers like sport equipment manufacturers and food service agencies. There is therefore a strong case for sports management companies, event organizers, etc. to look at CRM to improve customer experience, analyze ROI, and increase penetration of target segments.

CRM can be used to maintain a record of supporters, and also this can be linked to revenue generated from ticket sales, stadium spends, etc. The team website is a useful source of supporter information. Campaigns, containing special offers for registered supporters, can be sent out and the responses analyzed for where the team management should focus its efforts. Further, the typical sports fan is an outspoken individual and can be a valuable asset for the propagation of perceptions about the brand. He or she is the natural target for merchandising sales, and multiple channels can be employed to both engage with and enlist supporters. Care has to be taken, however, not to make this a purely commercial interaction. Much like insurance, the best referral is from an existing customer, and as in insurance, sports teams don't have customers, they are part of the family.

Advertisers and partners are ideally managed effectively through CRM systems. There is little difference between this and similar coordination in other verticals like media or entertainment. Media spends, advertising channels and reach need to be monitored, revenue tracked, and reports generated. The vertically integrated sports organization can find it easier to provide a packaged offering to its advertisers, for example, the New York Times Company might offer a bundled deal to Boston Red Sox endorsers. Partners, from merchandise manufacturers to hot dog sellers, can be provided portals to update their sales, available products, and even co-branded offers.

There is much more that can be done in the realm of sports management and CRM. For the moment, I'd rather turn my attention to the upcoming game and the Cardinals' offense, against which we have the Steelers' top ranking this season. Super Bowl advertising this year will cross $3 million for a 30-second spot. The entertainment will include Bruce Springsteen, Journey, and Jennifer Hudson. My money's on the Steelers, with their five previous wins. See you on the other side!

Posted by Aaman Lamba at 4:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In the past few months, I’ve had a number of interesting conversations & debates on benefits of Social CRM to sales organizations. I’m jotting down a few fundamental thoughts gathered from these discussions on ‘Social Sales’ vis-à-vis traditional sales here.

The business case for Social Sales is the same as that of traditional version. What are the costs versus increase in top line, profits, sales team productivity and customer experience? You will go about answering these questions in exactly the same way – using business improvement metrics and justifications for costs involved. The methodologies you will employ for coming up with the business case and roadmap are the same. This first step will help answer the question if your organization really needs a social sales platform. (By the way, if I were forced to put my money on the most likely CRM question to spring up in any company over the next 2 years, it is this one).

However, the similarities end there. Social Sales is not about process automation, pipeline visibility, contact/calendar management or mobility. To put it even more bluntly, if your SFA program is not meeting expectations, Social Sales is not your silver bullet. It is a harmonizing component that uses two different sales team measures that have not been used before – collaboration and innovation. When you embark on a Social Sales initiative, you will note how little a role your existing sales process diagrams will play. This fact is important to understand right at the beginning.

I had an interesting conversation on this topic with a friend of mine who happens to be a wealth manager in the US. The point of discussion was how to incentivize the sales team to adapt to Social Sales. One key aspect of Social Sales is going to be imbibing the culture of ‘information contribution’. We even debated the possibility of collaboration and innovation as measures that might eventually play a role in the next generation sales team’s compensation (you now have an extended imaginary sales territory over which you have a higher span of influence and material impact). However high sounding this may be, it sounds very real and feasible. We agreed that change management for the sales force needs to be spot on for Social Sales to succeed. A very high degree of understanding and adoption is essential for the sales team to succeed here.

What does this all mean to SFA products and services from a technology standpoint? Technologically, 3 dimensions will be looked at clearly. 1. Cloud, 2. Ease of use (2.0) and 3. Scalability. Especially with the presence of SAAS CRM providers, all these 3 dimensions are well understood and can be architected effectively. One key factor is going to be that Social Sales is not just going to be a functionally stable, utilitarian tool but also needs to be flamboyant. Accordingly, the technology skill-sets will be quite different.

From a roadmap perspective, Social Sales is going to be a very good pilot initiative before attempting the more complex collaboration, innovation and co-creation alongside the customer (especially in B2B situations). It is going to be a leading indicator for the success of your Social CRM experiment.

Posted by Badrinath Srinivasan at 4:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their “Blue Ocean Strategy” (ISBN 1591396190) have predicted that companies should move away from competition and create opportunity where profit and growth exists. Apple has been able to turn around its business, by creating a new market and new product offering through its iPod offering.

The application of Blue Ocean strategy to a Master Data Management opportunity space would be

a) Creation of a hosted Master Data Management solution using preferred vendor packages (IBM, Oracle, Siebel, Initiate etc)  - Small and Medium Business (SMB) can subscribe to these hosted MDM solution, that currently act as a clear technology differentiator for large companies.

b) Colluding of complimentary technology such as Open Source technology, SaaS, Collaboration, Web2.0, and MDM and Federated security.

Open source market penetration may require an organization to create an MDM suite that offers an end to end business transformation solution or addresses an MDM enablement program. A typical open source MDM suite would comprise having Sun – Mural MDM integrated through an open source ESB (E.g. WSO2 or JBOSS) and using open source LDAP (E.g. Apache Directory Server), open source database (E.g. MySQL) and open source operating system (E.g. Linux). The MDM stack so created, could host Customer data and prospect data.

The entire MDM suite, can be hosted as “Software as a Service” offering with a “pay as you go model” based on various factors such as subscriber count, number of prospectus hosted, geography etc.  Value creation is achieved by visioning of such an open source MDM stack that leverages a hosted solution. It offers a distinctive lowered TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) for an SMB and can provide a IT Landscape for undertaking business transformation initiatives for mid market players.

A value creation process, in essence is not a garden with blooming roses, but has its share of thorns and associated toil. The challenges to be faced would be “regulatory enforcement” i.e. Sarbox compliance, Basel 2, PCI – DSS that requires transparency in data and “security” i.e. Segregation of Duty (SoD) and underlying Access Control List (ACL’s) for the core master data across multi-faceted roles and responsibilities. Achieving critical mass for a hosted solution and achieving in-flux point, where value gets realized is a challenge. All this obstacles could be mitigated if an organization is willing to collaborate with a “trusted-advisor” or “business-transformation” partner that understand the MDM landscape and can provide value-based and quality-oriented implementation model.

As an organization, would you be interested in subscribing to such a model? As an organization would you be interested to undertake a service-offering based assessment of an MDM solution using a subscriber SaaS business model?

 

Posted by Jairaj Asok Kumar at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The spurt in the usage of P2P networks (Social networking) has been the primary factor for creation of CRM 2.0. But the question is, is this the right forum for capturing and/or retaining your customer? When you visit social networking sites do you go there for building your network or for having fun or even for catching up with friends? Would you like to be targeted by a company sellling its products/services? Will you take kindly to a service agent trying to engage you into a chat about your recent complaint about your cellphone? Will you take this as an invasion of your privacy? These are some of the important questions which today's CRM gurus are trying to answer. Let me know what you think of CRM 2.0.

Posted by Shreedeep Panicker at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With the "R" word being on everyones water cooler talk it is but natural that this figures in the CRM budget planning for 2010. During such times the first casualty is always fresh IT investment as executives are looking for quick and easy cost cutting. What impact will this have on the long term prospects of the company if such indiscriminate chops happen for mission critical IT systems like CRM is very easy to guess.

While it is easy to justify cuts on all kinds of fresh investments in initiatives which have a long gestation period, yet it makes a lot of sense to study its long term impact before going ahead with these cuts.

If we were to look at CRM related spending then in most companies which have implemented CRM we have a definite owner for the system, be it the Corporate, Sales, Marketing or Customer Service and Support (CSS) teams or even indeed the IT department.

In such challenging times what is it that a B2B2C company must do - should it retain existing customers (strengthen CSS) or acquire new customers (strengthen Marketing and Sales) or do both? Given an option what makes more sense to put good money into good business, or, try and expand the good business a bit more to ensure that even if recession or competition were to take away some of their customers still they will have a nearly intact customer size? Or should they put in their valuable money into strengthening their existing CSS infrastructure and acquire that elusive 360 degree view of their customers?

Companies that invest in critical systems like CRM during leaner times are strategically poised to ride the upswing faster than their competitors.

Posted by Shreedeep Panicker at 4:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

How does an enterprise get to a stage where it can call itself a CRM 2.0 enterprise?

I strongly agree with what Paul Greenberg states on his CRM2.0 related blog on Zdnet. He mentions - "You can’t just substitute CRM 2.0 for CRM 1.0 and expect to succeed".

Accordingly I believe that the process of transforming from a CRM 1.0 enterprise to a CRM 2.0 enterprise will be a phased process which will evolve as the CRM 2.0 concept itself evolves.

CRM 1.0, which is more operational or transactional in nature, is still very much a part of the CRM Strategy for most enterprises.  Accordingly, CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a system and a technology, designed to improve human interactions in a business environment.

CRM 2.0 is an evolving concept. The CRM community on Wiki, which was formed to define CRM 2.0, defines it as, “CRM 2.0 is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation. CRM 2.0 is built around business models, strategies for interaction and engagement, where CRM 1.0 was around transactions and management.”

How does an enterprise get to a stage where it can call itself a CRM 2.0 enterprise? This is a very difficult question to answer because, though we realize the popularity of social networks is immense and understand that it would be a strategic steps for enterprises to reach out to their customers through this medium, the process to best achieve this is still not clear.

We are only in the early stages as some CRM vendors announce integration of Social CRM functionalities in their new offerings, provide links to communities they have created on external social networks and enterprises promote blogs, wiki and other social networking concepts internally.

Most of us would agree that this will be a phased approach and not a direct ‘switch’. Enterprises will need to go through some CRM 1.X versions before they can truly derive the benefits of CRM 2.0.  I hope to follow this journey towards CRM 2.0 by posting my learnings on this blog and get some inputs from the broader community as we set out on this journey.

Posted by Haresh Parmar at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

A holistic master data management (MDM) initiative requires attention to four key areas. It is not sufficient merely to identify and load data for master entities like customer, product, etc. from the sources to the MDM Hub.

Streamlined data processes, workflows, and data governance rules must be established to ensure that data is managed effectively. The master data repository needs to enforce data quality rules and ensure data is updated through internal data synchronization with other enterprise systems. Equally importantly, the data should be enriched through electronic data synchronization with partners, suppliers, and reference data pools such as those provided by Dun & Bradstreet and Silver Creek Systems. Finally, uniform global hierarchies need to be established for customers, vendors, items, etc. to ensure the business definitions are used consistently across the enterprise.

These activities cannot be performed all at once. An MDM program that attempts to include all systems and user groups in the first release will find it difficult to realize its business objectives and achieve desired levels of user participation, given the often conflicting perceptions of data between business units and their need to fit enterprise IT programs into their own business roadmaps. An evolutionary implementation of MDM is the key to success. This lets people opt in to the enterprise vision in a measured pace and also demonstrates the realization of business benefits (along with the initial pain) by the early adopters.

In the first Enablement phase, the objective is to establish the MDM repository for core master data. Data governance rules and processes are defined through workshops with data owners, architects, and business users. Importantly, metrics are defined using the MDM Value Realization Framework. The latter half of the enablement phase focuses on data acquisition and consolidation from primary source systems, and the pilot rollout of MDM-enabled processes. MDM tool selection and data modeling is also done in this phase. Proof of concept scenarios are defined and executed to test product capabilities as well as to define an implementation plan for the program roadmap.  

Once pilot MDM processes have been deployed and feedback incorporated, the Growth phase of the MDM program can kick in. This is typically an iterative phase, with each wave expanding to cover additional systems and user groups. The end state of the Growth phase is typically a rationalized system landscape with over 60% of the master data integrated into the hub and streamlined lifecycle processes. Importantly, data quality and compliance adherence should exceed 80%, which is easier said than done, given the challenge in creating an enterprise-wide business glossary and enforcing data quality rules. Business benefit realization should be evident by this stage for a well-performing MDM implementation.

The final stage can be termed the Profitability phase. This is a state of continuous improvement, with the ability to easily integrate additional systems and data elements without significant rework to the existing hub. Over 90% of master data should be managed through the hub, conforming to the data governance processes and rules. Redundant systems and data storage can be minimized and some systems retired. MDM and BI reporting should be against master data sourced from the MDM repository, and critically, the MDM Value Realization Framework benchmarks should be continuously validated.

This multi-phase journey requires attention to budget and scope, and active participation of all involved business units with centralized governance a good fit for a heterogenous IT organization.

Posted by Aaman Lamba at 3:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most of us are concerned about where the economy is headed. Think of any project / business initiative so many questions arise in mind which are multi dimensional in nature. How long this recession is going to last? Will it be a long U curve lasting more than 12-18 months? Can we think what will be the impact on Call centers and customer care? Will there be a decrease in the spending in this area?

Call centers--
The summary is call centers are still hiring! What for? To survive in this market by doing more sales and marketing!

New products and promotions--
The companies are trying to put forward innovative products and promotions. For example, a free valet parking service near the shopping malls for buying a BMW car!

Customer Loyalty --
Also companies are trying their best to ensure customer loyalty by under promising and over delivery. Even though the customer is promised of 5 day delivery of a product/service, ensure that it reaches the customer in a day.

Do you think that these alternatives will make companies survive? What do you think on this? What would be the optimized approach in this hard time?

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 6:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Over the last decade, customer centricity has become a strategic approach for growth in a competitive marketplace. Global operations, increasing customer interactions coupled with low storage costs has led to an information explosion and organizations are struggling to get common data into one place - let alone use it for business decisions.
Is your organization able to consistently report a ‘single version of truth’?

Lack of comprehensive customer knowledge is an impediment for determining profitability from customer relationship. On the other hand, inability to capture profit trends across enterprise, impacts the predictability of profitable emerging markets and profitable product positioning. As a result, organizations have to deal with high costs of customer servicing, non- standardized customer-centric strategies and low return on customer-centric initiatives.
Is your organization entangled in this vicious circle of lack of customer information and inaccurate assessment of customer profitability?

Organizations need to look beyond customer data integration (technology focus) to focus on consolidation of customer knowledge (business focus). Customer data consolidation needs to be surrounded with an intelligent framework which can identify potential growth areas in customer profitability and value assessment. This framework can help organizations evolve from a ‘Report and Analyze’ model to ‘Predict and Act’ model to harness the ever-exploding customer information for profitable business decisions.
Is the information available within your organization ‘actionable’?

Posted by Indivar Nayyar at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Forrester Research conducted a survey of over 1000 North American and European IT decision makers on the key enterprise trends they perceive in 2008-09 as necessary to achieve enterprise strategic objectives.

This study was done before the onset of the current economic downturn, and shrinking IT budgets are likely to take a toll on enterprise implementations, as IT budgets mirror the decline in business spend. All the same, global corporations need to stay competitive and prepare for the future. A significant cause of the subprime crisis was insufficient assessment of risk and inadequate information sharing between lines of business in the enterprise. This occurs because information exists in multiple disparate systems and the processes are not interlinked, leading to inefficiencies and lost sales.

Little surprise then that the Forrester report indicated that enterprises are looking to implement effective collaboration strategies, leveraging service-oriented architectures and master data management. These technology implementations are critical for business users to be able to get a single view of trusted data and ensure that there is a consistency in the way different units implement business processes.

Companies that focus on achieving a high degree of data quality and standardized master data will be better able to deliver the right product to the right customer and at the same time ensure effective compliance and regulatory reporting. This also enables the enterprise to leverage and rationalize existing IT infrastructure, to "sweat the assets", as it were.

The end state of a successful master data management (MDM) intiative is a cleansed, real-time repository of master data like customers and products. This repository is updated from multiple source systems and publishes its information to downstream systems like data warehouses and operational systems, leading to closed loop data quality.

Posted by Aaman Lamba at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)