Telecommuting -- are today's CRM technologies capable?
Now a days telecommuting is the hot service. Today, employees can carry laptops around and stay connected to work almost anywhere. Telecommuters are linked to their office by using groupware, virtual private networks, and similar technologies to collaborate and interact with team members. As the price of VPN-capable routers, high-speed Internet connections to the home, and VOIP technology has plummeted in recent years, the cost to connect a telecommuter to their employer's intranet system has become negligible when compared with the operating costs of conventional offices. Telecommuting 2.0 takes advantage of Remote Office Centers, which are distributed centers for leasing offices to individuals from multiple companies.
Let us pose a question to ourselves. Who is offering these telecommuting services? I would say it is mainly the communication providers who are transforming into ICT service provides. Information and Communication technology providers. Certainly the latest network devices from Cisco and Juniper have made it possible for us eg. Infoscions to connect from anywhere to Infosys/client servers. Similarly any retail, banking, education, financial sectors are being served with the latest ICT services. I think this is beyond the convergent services that we have been talking for a while to provide solutions. It includes VOIP services, Wireless LAN services and IPVPN services. Of course we at Infosys are also regular users of such services wherever we are in the world.
One big question comes immediately to me do we have an appropriate IT architecture in both the Business Support Systems (BSS)/Operations Support Systems (OSS)? Being in CRM, let us analyze the changes in processes/functionalities required when compared to a generic telco processes.
- Apart from regular sales and order management process there exist a few processes like network/service feasibility and designs.
- Also the time frame for these processes is lengthy when compared to other services because of the complexity and technology involved in fulfillment
- Complexity of products and services the catalogue presentation during quote, order management and business rules around these
- Assurance of these services is another big area
- The user community and call centre community should be technically mature when compared to regular mobile/PSTN services.
- Integration of these services with the existing mobile/PSTN services in a single order
- Apart from providing appropriate bills (billing applications), ability to handle any related queries from CRM end
- Capturing bulk orders involving multi site and multi nations
- Complexity in pricing
Providing a decent solution with the existing COTS CRM products to these complexities is not that easy. Some of these functionalities/processes do not exist in the vanilla versions of COTS CRM products. Now-a-days these are the challenges that I have been thinking/working/facing in the present work.
Please do provide your comments and inputs.
