Customer Relationship Management

Day 2 and 3 of conference were in continuation of the themes set up by SAP. There were lots of speaker sessions, demo sessions, customer case studies and panel discussions on topics of interest. Lot of companies had put up booths in exhibit hall for interacting with prospects.

Some of the interesting sessions on day 2 were on Rich Internet Applications, on-premise Vs. on-cloud, mobility, analytics, social CRM and others.

Infosys speakers were also lined up for their sessions from Day 2 onwards. Sunil Thakur from "Information Systems" group of Infosys, was engaged in a panel discussion with other speakers from Suncor Energy and Applied Materials on discussing the strategies for ensuring sales success. The discussion brought interesting points ranging from alternative channels for using CRM applications, data governance, training needs and user adoption.

Later in the day Sunil also presented Infosys case study for internal SAP CRM implementations. Infosys's approach of making CRM processes and workflows available on the blackberry and MS-Outlook generated lot of interest.

My interaction with other delegates made me believe that most of the CRM implementation suffers from common problems like data governance and user adoption. I believe company's focus on these two elements can considerably increase the CRM implementation success rates. There is lot of discussion on emerging areas like cloud and social CRM, but at the end of the day things should remain simple and intuitive for your end users, irrespective of the technologies driving it from back-end.

Like the previous day, day 2 also ended with CRM expert sessions and cocktail reception.

I and my colleague "Bhanu Pratap Singh" had presentation on "Best Practices & Challenges during Email Response Management System implementation" on first half of Day 3. The presentation went very well with a decent turn-out. Our focus on sharing the "watch-out for.." elements during ERMS implementation grabbed lot of attention from the delegates.

SAP introduced another solution from Business Objects to manage data migration. It was good to see a single solution from SAP's kitty, which can manage extraction, transformation and loading into SAP systems.  

The day progressed and ended by around 5:00 pm with exhibitors also wrapping up their stalls.

My overall assessment for the conference was pleasant. It was nice to hear the emerging trends and technologies from fellow speakers. Lot of start-ups are creating value in niche-areas for the end customers and growing up fast during the journey.

Day 5 is a short one with sessions lined up for only half-day. So this 2^nd blog will be the last one from me from Orlando. I hope to return again next year with more content to present. Adios !

Posted by Vishal Mani at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Being the flagship event for SAP CRM, it is always exciting to attend this annual event which is about getting the news, views and networking opportunities related to CRM solutions from SAP.

This year the event is being held from Mar 21 - 25 in Orlando, FL, USA. First day being the jumpstart day, the real action began from Day 2 with the keynote session delivered by 'Jujhar Singh', SVP CRM Solutions for SAP.

The message of the keynote presentation was on the need to make a positive customer experience resulting in TRUST for your company. As the cross channel communication is on the rise, companies need to harmonize the processes and data irrespective of the customer touch-point leading to "One trusted View of the customer".

Having this theme to begin with, SAP's thrust of providing solution "On Demand, On Premise and On Device" was very much evident. There was additional emphasis on SAP's unique approach for CRM framework of excellence, having three key elements like Interaction, Operational and Decision Excellence.

Among the key announcements was the launch of 'Sales - On Demand" solution by SAP around Apr 2011. There was a lot of buzz around it with multiple speaker and hands-on sessions planned for it.  SAP later hinted that this could be the end of road for SAP's investment in their existing SAP CRM on-demand solution, which has been in the market for 4-5 years but has yet to get desired traction in terms of adoption.

"Sales-On demand" solution has been built on "By Design" platform with a completely new User Interface. Look and feel of the new UI was very refreshing and distinct than any other existing SAP solution. One can't ignore the Twitter like feeds, integrated object updates, integrated analytics, ERP interface, outlook integration and much more. More details on this solution can be fetched from http://sales.ondemand.com/

Another buzz was around SAP's new web channel platform, which has been due for release for a long time. Tentative timeline for its release is around July 2011. The demo gave the glimpse of what to expect from new solution in terms of common platform for B2C and B2B processes for sales, service and marketing. On the flip side, there might not be a smooth upgrade path for the existing web channel users to this new solution.

Mobility, Social CRM and High Volume Real-time Analytics were the other key focus areas during the keynote address.

Sybase's expected release for Mobile Service and Syclo's joint development with Sybase on its Unwired Platform (SUP) were the discussion points in mobility area. SAP's additional offerings in Social CRM integration (Twitter, Facebook) with SAP CRM clearly demonstrated the upcoming trends.

The day later progressed with multiple sessions on SAP CRM roadmap, enhancements in EhP1 components, Rapid deployment solutions, partner solutions, customer case studies and many others.

The large gathering of customers, consulting companies and analyst clearly demonstrated the excitement in CRM solutions by SAP.  

The day ended with Ask the Expert session and welcome reception with ample opportunity for socializing with other guests.

Will keep posting you all with updates for following days, so stay tuned...

Posted by Vishal Mani at 9:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today the number of customers having the prepaid mobile subscriptions in the world is quite large. This is increasing day by day since more and more customers are availing the mobile services. Most of the customers prefer to buy a prepay subscription in order to control their spend. Prepay is also beneficial proposition to the telecom operators since their risk is reduced and the money is collected in advance. Hence most of the telecom operators are trying to introduce newer ways to attract customers to their prepay offers.

For the prepay products, the customer decides in the manner in which he/she would like to recharge his account and hence there is no guaranteed income for the telecom companies every month. In order to generate the guaranteed income companies keep a limit on the period till which the customer can remain connected to the network without recharging his account. The companies also adopt a way to wave off the balance and free benefits after a period of no recharge by the customer. For prepay customers, the telecom companies terminate the call / data session immediately when the balance goes low/zero. But this impacts the customer experience.

Some of the factors that drive customer experience for the prepay customers are:

1.       Seamless service without going out of balance

2.       Controlled Monthly Spend

3.       No hassles to recharge manually and submit the customer identification document copies each time

4.       Benefits comparable to post-pay customers

5.       Per second billing

In order to increase the assured revenue from the existing prepay customers, telecom operators have adopted new business models which are similar to the post-pay models. Some of the models adopted by the operators are:

Have an agreement signed with the Customer, while purchasing the pre-paid service, for the Electronic Fund Transfer (EFT), to top up the pre-paid minimum balance as and when it goes low. This EFT amount could be fixed (say for a month), so that the service providers do not deduct beyond that value.

Deduct a fixed amount every month from customers bank account towards recharge based on customers calling/spend pattern after customer consent on a fixed day of the month.

Deduct a fixed amount from customers bank account every time the customer goes low on his/her balance.

Offer additional benefits (e.g. free minutes) to the customers who are willing to adopt above two modes of payment over the regular prepay customers.

Per second calling rates.

Now with mobile micro payments being allowed, the customers can easily top up their pre-paid amount by initiating the fund transfer, through an SMS, from their bank account to the service provider (in many situations, the customer finds it difficult to go to the PoS or online to top up the pre-paid amount, in this situation, SMS based mobile fund transfer would serve handy)

By implementing the above mentioned models, telecom companies can achieve customer loyalty and retention even for the prepay customers and this results in increased assured revenue for the company.

Posted by Suhas Kanade at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Guest Post by
Jakki Geiger, Director, MDM Marketing, Informatica

CRM 1.0 sounded good in theory. Deploy a CRM system, achieve a 360-degree customer view, and watch your sales and customer loyalty metrics soar.

Just one problem. In too many cases, CRM 1.0 forgot about the data. Untold numbers of multimillion-dollar CRM systems failed to live up to their potential because they were undermined by duplicate customer data, incorrect customer data, inconsistent customer data and incomplete customer data.

Now CRM 2.0 is under way, and data quality is in the spotlight. Large numbers of companies are opting for cloud-based CRM system, whether with salesforce.com or another software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. Mindful of the data lessons of CRM 1.0, companies aim to get the data right this time.

The "secret sauce" for CRM 2.0 is master data management (MDM), believes John Radcliffe, a veteran Gartner analyst. In a recent article at mycustomer.com, Radcliffe addressed how MDM is emerging as a core principle for CRM 2.0, especially cloud-based systems and those that endeavor to leverage customer data via social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

We at Informatica completely agree with Gartner. We've seen increasing customer demand for cloud-based data management as well as interest in incorporating social media data into a 360-degree customer view. Informatica CMO Chris Boorman recently recorded a video on the role of social media data in CRM 2.0 that I think you'd find interesting.

Though social media data for CRM 2.0 is cutting edge (for now), MDM has become a proven technology and discipline that delivers the trusted, complete customer data that companies need for effective cross-sell and up-sell and enhanced customer loyalty, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Soon enough, we expect this sauce won't be so secret, but rather a foundational element of CRM 2.0.

Posted by Jakki Geiger at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)