Customer Relationship Management

Social commerce is being talked about as a game changer for organizations in the near future. The adoption will be quicker for those operating in B2C domain. Social Commerce in itself is an umbrella under which many sub-models can be defined. One such model that is gaining popularirty are the emergence of Group buying sites like Groupon, Snapdeal.com and others.

This business model has seen lot of growth in recent times. Be it the incessant amount of funding for start-ups or the craze among customers, this concept has caught the eyes of all alike. Being a customer for few of them, somehow I couldn't resist myself in analyzing the model from CRM standpoint. Thanks to my passion with stuffs that brings value to customers :).

Continue reading "CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While the technology advancements are significantly impacting the CRM space, I wish to look back at the basics of CRM and the needs of the Customers, especially the 'Common People'.

Continue reading "CRM for the 'Common People'..." »

Posted by Shanmugam Gnanasambandam at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The sad part is that I have already started getting the same vibes. Leveraging social media for your CRM initiatives makes sense but don't treat it in the same manner as other channels. If we observe,introduction of a channel as a customer touch point has always been governed by the following reasons: uniqueness, growing usage by customer and the proposed benefits it brings for the organization.

Continue reading "Avoid mistakes of traditional channels on social media" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Internet is out of space with allocation of last IP addresses. If you are wondering that the opening note is contradicting the title of this blog then no - not really in fact there is a strong correlation. Are you still baffled then here you go - "IPv4" which was allocating IP addresses is running out of new IP address for allocation and eventually paving the way to its successor IPV6 who had been waiting to take the rein for almost a decade now...without digging into the technicality of IPV4-IPV6 migration the 2 exciting facts in the news are:

1.     IPv4 running out of IP address means we have already got 4.3+ billion or more connected devices already and still growing !!!

2.     IPv6 can offer up to 346 Trillion IP address, which means the possibility of every pebble to have an IP address (if anyone ever wonder a why an IP address for a pebble J...pebble is used just a metaphor here).  

It's no surprise that proliferation of smart-phones and partly the re-emergence of tablets had expedited the process of IPV4 conclusion. In fact, Smartphones had started eating the pie of the PC market prompting many majors such as Dell (Streak) and HP (iPAQ) to plunge into the Smartphone segment to cover their lost ground. Analyst evens predicts smart-phones sales in 2011 to outnumber the PC sales.

Emergence of Mobile Platform: Consumer appetite for smart-phones is evident and reemphasizing the shift in customer preference towards mobility devices and mobile channels. But despite soaring interest, huge customer segment and technology enabler's "Mobile CRM" is still in its nascent stages. Primarily because not long ago, integrating an enterprise-wide CRM system with mobile devices was costly, time consuming and riddled with challenges. But those challenges have dissipated over the last few years....Yes, business doesn't need to foot a hefty bill for mobility services or devices, no more Offline client & complex data-synchronization challenges (its brings back my nightmares with Clarify CRM suite Traveller Client and its data synchronization issuesLL) with the advent of 3G networks, lowering cost of mobility devices & services, SOA principles and next generation Smartphones. Smartphone's aren't anymore a standalone gadgets they truly evolved into an ecosystem offering platform for content delivery, Apps, SDKs and Mobile commerce (payment gateway) enabling business to easily integrate their Enterprise CRM with Mobile Channel or launch a Mobile CRM Apps. Downloadable Smartphones applications and 3G networks had opened a whole new world of opportunities.

Continue reading "Soon every pebble will have an IP address...So Get, Set and Go on Mobile CRM" »

Posted by Mahadevan Meikum Perumal at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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)

Guest Post by

Mahadevan Meikum Perumal, Principal Consultant, Enterprise Application Integration and Solutions (EAIS), Enterprise Solutions, Infosys Technologies Ltd.

If you are a Wild West fan and checking this blog for Clint Eastwood magnum opus then apologies...as context setting is done...here you go

How often do you hear these comments or complaints from your operational CRM users community?

• Majority of the call time had been spent on navigating the screens in the CRM apps
• Need to switch between multiple Apps to get the required customer info
• CRM uptime or response time is an issue
• Time to run campaigns is long and unrealistic
• System stability or availability is an issues

All the above comments or critics converge towards a single issue - Yes, the Non-Functional aspects of the applications.

Continue reading "Good, Bad & Ugly " »

Posted by Guest Blogger at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Social CRM - will horseless carriage syndrome help the uptake or block the evolution?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 8:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attutide to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 2 of 2)" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Social CRM - shifting from 'command control' attitude to 'sense and respond' behavior (Part 1 of 2)" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 5:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Co-creation has been an interesting topic for last couple of years and we have heard so much from C.K. Prahalad on this who firmly propagated that future of competition is going to be based on the ability of the organization to co-create with their customers. In my view, ultimate value of the social technology paradigm (in the context of CRM) is actually going to be the creation of new customer experience possibility which seems to be in the core of this co-creation theory.

To me it is clear that creation of new customer experience is going to be the light at the end of the tunnel that will drive the future of the social CRM. However, the important question is if this customer experience creation will happen by the organization or will it be driven by the customer community. Is co-creation really sustainable and can organizations bet on it for their future innovation?

Continue reading "Social CRM - can organizations actually rely on the ideas from customers for future innovations?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One thing, which we as subscribers, do not prefer, is change of our personal mobile number, especially when we are using it for a few or more years, as we would have shared it with our family & friends and other service providers (e.g. banks, insurance companies, schools, book stores, membership clubs). Any change in our personal mobile number, really causes a lot of inconvenience to us and others, as it really takes a good amount of time and meticulous effort to communicate the change in our mobile numbers and others duly updating their address books/records, for future communication.

It is for this reason, many subscribers like us, end up staying with a specific service provider, even if we are little dissatisfied with their services (e.g. Quality of Service, Price and Customer Service Support). At times, this specific situation allows the service providers to take their customers/subscribers for granted.

One big relief to this problem is the excellent feature Mobile Number Portability (MNP), which allows subscribers to retain their existing mobile numbers when they switch from one mobile service provider to another.

Continue reading "Mobile Number Portability (MNP) - A Good Test for Customer Loyalty" »

Posted by Shanmugam Gnanasambandam at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Enterprises need to start taking the social media transactions no lesser seriously than the regular customer engagement transactions when it comes to issues like privacy, response liabilities, customer identity theft, information misrepresentation etc. I recently came across various cases that clearly highlight the need for the same. I will share some of them below in this blog.

Electronic social media platforms is intensifying the visibility, reach and speed with which sentiments and specifics related to customer experience travel the globe. I recall reading a news article sometime back in 2009 where a district judge in Boulder, Colorado (USA) approved the validity of the use of social media tools like twitter and blogs to cover the court trail cases.  It highlights how the speed of information dissemination across various walks of life inclusive of personal, business and even legal eco-system is becoming 'cooler' option that allows influence of the information be 'here and now and across'.

Continue reading "Social CRM - managing the accountability challenges for the customer interactions on social media" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Social CRM - so much is being said, debated, discussed and speculated but sad part is that much of it is more of the same. I guess that's temporary phenomenon because there is little that is available and there are too many to talk about it, another side of the social networking power -  gets everyone to talk, share, express, couldn't have been any other way. But I suppose we may re-live the experience of dotcom days, may be in slightly different shades of color. As I said earlier, more than what is being talked about, I'm excited about stuff that is still to be discovered and to be talked about. Here is one of such side-effects of the social CRM revolution - emergence of 'Social Customer Experience Designers' - a creative specialist community that will have power to revolutionize how social technologies are put to use between enterprises and customers.

Continue reading "Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 4:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.

Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.

So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that. 

Continue reading "Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 8:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

From last few months, I have come across the term "Enterprise collaboration" very often and that too mostly in the context of Social CRM.  In my view, the primary relationship between Enterprise collaboration and Social CRM is due to 'Social' behavior shown by the people and that's about it. The objective for using either of these in the organization can be as different as chalk and cheese.

Continue reading "Enterprise Collaboration and Social CRM - exploring the relationship?" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Personally, I used to be facinated by the invention of the Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, in 1876, which laid the foundation for telecommunications (communication over a distance). Since then, the last few generations have seen the rapid growth and advancements of the telecommunication networks, in the area of switching, transmission and end user devices.

The telecommunication network evolution started with the Land Line Telephone Neworks, where the telephones at home/offices used to be connected to the Local Telephone Exchange, through the Local Loop. The Land Line Telephones evolved from the Pick the Cradle and Speak type of telephones, to Rotary Dial Telephones to Push Button Telephones, which are still in use.

In the last 125+ years, the telecom service providers across the World, have invested heavily in building and operating their Land Line Telephone Network Infrastructure and have progressively grown a significant volume of Customer base. However, the tremendous growth of Mobile Phones, in the last few decades , has not only affected the growth of Land Line Phones, but also reduced the existing Land Line Customer Base, as Customers have progressively started to move towards mobile phone, due to the flexibility it offers, especially communication on the move.

Continue reading "Long Distance Calls at Local Call Rates - BSNL's attempt to retain Land Line Customers in India: The Customer Really Benefits " »

Posted by Shanmugam Gnanasambandam at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Using Personality & Horoscopes in enriching CRM" »

Posted by Nishith Gupta at 5:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Innovation: Is it always a Key?" »

Posted by Anshul Tiwari at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As the current generation is moving towards maturity and newer generation is slowly taking over, its time to reconsider the changing face of CRM.
The future needs will be dramatically different than today, there is an impact of media, social networking and word of mouth advertising much much more than the ad media alone.
Also the ageing pattern will play a very important role in the CRM domain.

Continue reading "Keeping pace with the Changing Face of CRM" »

Posted by Ravi Agarwal at 1:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Loyalty programs are very common today and are run by almost all leading brands. With growing competition and more and more choices becoming available to the customer, the importance of loyalty initiatives has increased many folds.The realization that it is more crucial and cost effective to retain an old customer than acquiring new ones, is coming steady and fast on incorporates.

Continue reading "Effectiveness of Loyalty Programs" »

Posted by Anshul Tiwari at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)

Very often, we call up a service help desk with service issues or other related problems and complaints. Each call to the service help desk incurs some cost to the company, in terms of network, bandwidth, time, availability or infrastructure.

The prime reasons for a customer contacting a support help desk are:

1. To resolve issue/problems faced by the customer
2. To get additional information.

Continue reading "Automating Customer Issue Resolutions " »

Posted by Suhas Pralhad Moharir at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RightNow's announcement in March about their new licensing structure is being lauded as a game changer, but I would like to term it as a step in the right direction. This is a step in the right direction towards the promised land of 'Reaping SaaS benefits'. By offering a Three Year Price Commitment plus Three Year Renewal Price Cap coupled with Annual Termination option, cash credit for SLA breaches and real 'pay-as-you-go' contracts, RightNow has openly challenged the providers of SaaS who engage with customers with multi-year 'lock-in' contracts. The SaaS market as it stands, thrives on some of the key positives of the on demand concept. Quicker time to market, lesser maintenance headache (compared to on-premise software) is enough for most companies to go for a SaaS offering. Given that, the SaaS providers need to differentiate themselves and they do so and compete based on the functionality that they offer. But once the capability of the software S of SaaS starts to even out, the service S of SaaS will be the differentiator.

Continue reading "RightNow's Customer Service Agreement (CSA) - A Step in the right direction" »

Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 8:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

How many times do we actively participate in a survey? Whenever one is requested to complete a survey, we first think about the time it is going to take and try to avoid it, even if we start answering the questions, we have several doubts on the data we can provide, then again based on the very recent experience or mind frame we are in at that point of time, we might not even provide accurate data. So it is not a hyperbole if I say conducting customer surveys is very challenging task for any organization. Even after addressing the challenges, one cannot expect accurate responses from customers since a customer's response depends on his/her frame of mind while responding to the survey. Most of the customers might not respond to the survey. The reasons might be that the customers might be unhappy with the time, channel of the survey and the list doesn't end there...

Continue reading "Single Survey - Multiple Interactions" »

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 5:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "The Three Social Pillars and Batman!" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 5:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We have seen the tremendous rise in internet usage in the recent past. Even with such fast growth, internet penetration is only about 25% of the world population with a large scope for further growth. Also, commerce over the internet is growing due to increased transaction security and ease of operation. Companies should take advantage of this online channel for trade to increase customer satisfaction and reduce cost of operations through a self service facility. But in order to take the full advantage of online channel, companies should conduct a detailed study of the various factors involved before embarking on their online strategy.

Continue reading "Improve Customer Experience through a well planned Online Self Service Strategy" »

Posted by Suhas Kanade at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For companies to innovate, it is largely understood that there are two components involved: exploiting existing internal repository of knowledge and secondly, exploring new ideas, some of which can be directly adopted from external sources including customers, suppliers, partners etc. On one hand, managers may experience a cultural inertia on the idea of customer as a collaborator; on other hand, there is also an access issue - how do you make relevant customer feedback flow through the organization?

Continue reading "Could CRM lead to innovation?" »

Posted by Arun George at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Some of you might have read the recent blog entry titled “How CRM products can aid Marketing” by fellow Infosys CRM blogger Vamsi Krishna. He ended his entry with the question “are marketers really using these CRM product capabilities to the maximum extent?”

While that certainly is a relevant question to ponder for small scale and stand alone marketing implementations, a deeper look at the needs of large scale Enterprise Marketing departments seems to indicate that functionality coverage in today’s CRM products is not sufficient.

Continue reading "Is functionality coverage in CRM products today sufficient for Enterprise Marketing?" »

Posted by Alex Rishi Sankar at 3:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The New Normal is the “Now” Normal. This was the theme of the key note address at SAP Insider conference currently underway at Orlando, FL (see my previous blog post, SAP CRM 2010 Insider Conference). As the economy is coming out of a major slow down, the organizations are not necessarily changing their cost structures that came under tremendous pressure but expecting to continue at the same levels and do more with less. New investments are being planned but only with an expectation to demonstrate better results on an immediate basis - the ‘now’ normal. SAP’s executives discussed ways how SAP’s suite of products can be leveraged in identifying such targeted investments which will help solve today’s complex business problems, be nimble, effective, profitable and quicker to implement.

Continue reading "SAP Insider CRM 2010- The New Normal is the “Now” normal" »

Posted by Rishi Handa at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Anyone who has experienced the last fifteen years of generational shift in marketing would have seen every aspect of marketing strategy and varied focused approaches towards selling. We do remember a time when organizations were more ‘product’ focused, launching of products was not all that frequent and retiring cycles were long. Customers didn’t have many options other than sticking on (in fact, the term customer experience was not used very frequently) as there was less competition. Then came the era of competition, where organizations not only thought about acquiring new customers but retaining the customers became a key priority. This was the dawn of a ‘Customer’ focused approach with up-selling, cross-selling, loyalty etc being the new buzz words.

Continue reading "Importance of service based approach" »

Posted by Amit Goel at 7:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My previous post, “Marketing without measuring Marketing ROI is casualty” ended by stating that CRM products can help in enhancing marketing operations and measuring ROI more accurately. In this blog I will try to bring out how CRM products can aid marketers.

Continue reading "How CRM products can aid Marketing" »

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Most CRM initiatives are started with much expectations and enthusiasm and perhaps with much funds allotted as well. But the key success factor is having a systematic approach to identify and assess levers for business value and impact for these implementations.

Continue reading "Assessing the Value of your CRM Initiatives" »

Posted by Khanchana at 8:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The success of a CRM implementation lies in its acceptance for use by the various stakeholders. The stakeholders vary depending on the industry and application in question. Some of the stakeholders commonly involved in CRM are top management, marketing managers, retail sales agents / call center agents / field sales agents, customers using self care applications, dealers and product managers. Each stakeholder has their own set of expectations from the CRM system. Based on my experience in working with some of these stakeholders, I have listed below some of their expectations:

Continue reading "Stakeholder Expectations from a CRM Application" »

Posted by Suhas Kanade at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having worked on CRM system implementations for quite some time, I have been listening to one common statement from business / product managers - I am not satisfied with the CRM system that is being deployed/was recently deployed. It is a common complaint across the spectrum, right from small businesses to the larger enterprises. Why this does happen again and again, that too across the world? Is it that technology cannot meet business requirements and expectations all the time? In this post I would like to discuss one of my observations and find some ways to address this issue.

Continue reading "CRM Strategy - Business vs. Technology" »

Posted by Raja Sekhar Ravi at 4:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I read an article on “Indian FMCG industry”, the article talks about lavish marketing spends in FMCG. This year marketing spends growth was twice that of the sales growth in Indian FMCG industry. In one way this is good news, Marketing is being given importance but unfortunate thing is that they are running towards a big disaster without measuring ROI on Marketing. Marketing was considered as a function which doesn’t provide any value addition when compared with its sibling sales. It is considered as a cost center.

Continue reading "Marketing without measuring Marketing ROI is casualty" »

Posted by Vamsi Krishna at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In this post and in a few forthcoming ones I intend to dwell upon key factors that builds a loyal customer base.

Clear customer focus and a customer centered/driven  value-chain are hygiene factors  to build loyalty  in today’s cluttered market place. Customer centric processes are not only mandatory in CRM functions like Sales, Marketing and Service/after-sales support but also in the core functions like order processing, manufacturing and product development.

Continue reading "Building a Loyal Customer Base" »

Posted by Khanchana at 4:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Not sure if you all noticed this quite development over the last weekend, Amazon finally after all the regulatory checks was able to close the acquisition of Zappos, this company as we know became a billion dollar company form a shoe store.

Continue reading ""Zappos and the way to ride the Social Marketing wave"" »

Posted by Rituparn Prem Dixit at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

by Vijey Rao

In the recent years, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies have increasingly depended on trade promotions to drive brand recognition, brand interest and translate this awareness into greater sales at point of sale.

The recent downturn of the global economy has made the retail consumer have a close look at the rules of engagement between herself and CPG companies; and she wants “CHANGE” -

Continue reading "Effective Trade Promotion Management in the “Post- Lehman” Economy" »

Posted by Guest Author at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Scene-1
A tweet by client9 - @no1insocialmedia | thanks for the demo today. Would love it if the community creation in the tool could latch on to the private cloud.

Scene-2
Our Mike, Matt and John(the CIO) are in a meeting to pore over tomorrow’s sales pitches.
Matt: John, Mike was mentioning about some feedback he received on Twitter today from our client from the coast side, about cloud integration capability.

Scene-3/Act1  John: Yeah, Matt lets put it on our to-do list anyways the product management has a long list.

Scene-3/Act2  John: Great Mikey! Matt, let’s use this feedback and see if we can prioritize this one as client9 has been a good advocate of our business. Lets use this feedback effectively as otherwise we need to request such ones. It also costs you see.

Continue reading "Social Media – Feedback is essential and an important ingredient of SCRM. Use it to benefit" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 4:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

In part I I had looked at why companies implement CRM and had promised to answer the following questions “What factors have the maximum impact on the success of CRM projects and initiatives?” And “CRM initiative will impact which all areas?” in my subsequent posts. Well it has been a long wait to discover answers to these intricate questions  so without much ado I will look at them straight away –

Continue reading "Why do companies implement CRM and other such questions – Part II" »

Posted by Shreedeep Panicker at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have a theory. In the English language, 'Customer Experience' is possibly the term with the most variety of definitions. I wish to add to this record and hence this blog.

There are two dimensions of Customer Experience that I need to lay emphasis on while defining CEM– firstly, it is measurable and secondly, it isn’t an engine that runs in isolation to generate success. I’ll elaborate on both these dimensions…

Continue reading "Is Customer Experience a lone ranger?" »

Posted by Badrinath Srinivasan at 6:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

With the evolution of Social media on a rapid scale, what with Salesforce now coming out with Service Cloud 2; is it already time to think how much of this can be measured?

In the good old days of CRM and other evolving concepts/strategies the innovation, acceptance, implementation, integration, feedback, service quality etc. took time, effort and a lot of money. Over the years all of these have been dealt with and there are many a ready-made solutions and excellent products made available. We have seen CRM mature over the years. The TCO, ROI, scalability, flexibility and high-performance were critical factors to success and these were taken care of. The measurement per se, of CRM has been lost in this mêlée somewhere though not completely and it came in late. Measuring the CRM success via the Balanced Scorecard model is one way.

Continue reading "Social CRM –Measure it, harness the benefits in tandem – A Balanced Scorecard Interpretation" »

Posted by Venkataraman Ramanathan at 6:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a Liverpool fan. I regularly follow all the matches they play and visit a set of websites to capture the news at the club. Sometimes I don’t get to watch all the matches, if I’m travelling or attending some important meeting or busy with some personal task. I would be yearning to see if someone can send me the details through SMS for matches with video clips of the goals scored. I get some updates from a website which charges me way too much since it’s a UK based service. I have a Liverpool theme on my desktop and constantly discuss the club in Facebook and Orkut and other public forums. And this month when I visited the website of my mobile company to pay the bill I saw the link to download Manchester United ring tones etc. If you knew about the rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester United in the past season, you would realize how much that link irritated me.  I was thinking, “if only the company knew there are enough Liverpool fans in this part of the world. If only they knew I would be interested in such content on my mobile. If only there is a way for them to realize that I leave enough clues in public forums. If only…” This situation could be very true with IPL fans or in general any sports fan. This can be further extended to any interest that a regular person might have including cooking, travelling, etc etc.

Continue reading "Social CRM: The place where everyone wants to be" »

Posted by Pradeep Baptist at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I was browsing our internal Blog community and came across some interesting points penned down by Khanchana on the relevance of CRM investments in the current economic scenario. Here are some interesting excerpts to take away from her blog.

Continue reading "Investment in CRM - Is it relevant NOW?" »

Posted by Haresh Parmar at 5:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)