If CRM has been a struggle or a passion for you then Infosys’ CRM blogs is the place to be in. Come join us as we discuss the latest trends, innovations and happenings which will have a bearing on CRM.

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January 5, 2012

Cloud Computing: Will it thunder or rain?

Higher productivity, better resource utilization and innovative solutions are some of the critical factors for sustainability of any organization. In today's highly competitive environment, organizations need to be more agile, flexible and able to respond to changing customer preferences quickly. IT, as an enabler of doing business efficiently, has always provided a bucket of solutions to organizations to achieve their business goals. Customized applications, SAP, Oracle, Siebel packages etc. are some of the preferred solutions for the organizations. Although these IT solutions provide desired results to organizations but their implementation and maintenance are huge upfront costs for any organization. In global economic uncertainty and tightening market, organizations need to evaluate other options which are secure, reliable and cheaper. It makes a case for cloud computing based IT solutions. Cloud computing has become buzzword in today's business world globally and organizations are certainly cannot ignore it without evaluation.

Continue reading "Cloud Computing: Will it thunder or rain?" »

Game-changers in the Cloud: Focus on CRM - Part 1

Lately there has been a lot of debate on the possible barriers to user adoption of cloud based technologies due to obvious concerns of data privacy, especially when it comes to sensitive data like company IP (design, manufacturing, etc.) residing on service provider's datacenters with little or no control.

Continue reading "Game-changers in the Cloud: Focus on CRM - Part 1" »

October 25, 2011

Data profiling is all about CCC- AID? (Part 2)

In this part, we intend to apply the data principles discussed in the previous part onto a sample set of data using Talend™ open profiler tool.

The tool is very simple to install and use, installation is pretty much simple and once installed the eclipse work bench look and feel with cheat sheets allows any person to quickly learn the trick and trade of profiling. A graphic representation of the Talend ™ open profiler.

Continue reading "Data profiling is all about CCC- AID? (Part 2)" »

October 20, 2011

Data profiling is all about CCC- AID? (Part 1)

By Jairaj Asok Kumar

Catch phrase or some gimmick! Well, the easiest way to pen your thought in concepts around Master Data Management is to look around and see what problem you are facing and evaluate if the problem is repeatable in nature. Every data management project I have been involved in, the key problem that persists is around bad data quality. Most clients consider that data quality in their existing system is correct, right and true. So how do you define correct, right and true? This is where the term CCC-AID comes in. Read on.

Continue reading "Data profiling is all about CCC- AID? (Part 1)" »

September 8, 2011

CRM Essentials for Group-Buying Sites

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" »

August 24, 2011

DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2

By Praveen Kadayinti and Archit Agrawal

This blog has come in two parts where we are discussing about internet banking models and CRM. In the previous blog (Part 1 - find here) we have discussed about two such models. We will highlight a third model in this part and analyze our views.

Model III
A new market has also been identified online where prospective lenders and borrowers meet online, thus reducing transaction time and costs involved with traditional banking methods. Currently banks act as middlemen, collecting funds from individuals who have a surplus (providing an interest rate), and disbursing to people in need (charging an interest rate).  The difference in interest rates funds the operation as well as helps the bank make a profit.

Continue reading "DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 2" »

August 18, 2011

DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 1

By Praveen Kadayinti and Archit Agrawal

This blog will come in two parts where we discuss in internet banking models and CRM. We will discuss on two such models that we come across in this blog.

Here, we look at some of the disruptive Internet based banking models that have come up in the last few years, and analyze how traditional banks will have to change themselves to cope with these new models. Traditional banks will have two options; either follow the curve or lead the curve. Leading the technology curve may result in cannibalization of their existing business products but following the curve might reduce the banks to insignificant players if the market grows exponentially in favor of the early adopters of technology.

Continue reading "DISRUPTIVE INTERNET BANKING MODELS - Part 1" »

August 10, 2011

CRM for the 'Common People'...

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'..." »

March 25, 2011

Day 2 & 3 @ SAP CRM 2011 Conference in Orlando, FL, USA

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 2nd blog will be the last one from me from Orlando. I hope to return again next year with more content to present. Adios !

March 23, 2011

Day 0 and Day 1 @ SAP CRM 2011 Conference in Orlando, FL, US

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...

March 17, 2011

Improved Prepaid Customer experience and Assured Monthly Revenue through Innovative Business Models

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.

 

February 14, 2011

Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?

I am in no way going to contradict this statement. We are social and the same can be seen of different species in the world. But an interesting piece of news: Ford car that tweets  just gave a new insight into the whole social paradigm. It took me to a whole new world of interactions and the change it can bring about in future relationships. We have seen it in films, cartoons and sometimes even we talk subconsciously to the objects!

Continue reading "Will social phenomenon move beyond the living beings?" »

February 10, 2011

Social CRM - will horseless carriage syndrome help the uptake or block the evolution?

There are good chances that you haven't heard of horseless carriage syndrome before. I don't think it's a popular one but surely very interesting and relevant. If you Google for it, you will find lot of articles floating around on this in the cloud computing context. The horseless carriage syndrome goes like this:

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

February 3, 2011

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

The analogy of the command-and-control and sense-and-respond helps me to connect with the style of management/practices and see the evolution of social CRM in that context. There are emerging discussions about the enterprises that are managing the business in 'sense-and-respond' approach and my post here is somewhat aligns to that thought process. There is a very good post here for those of you who are interested in further venturing into it. Coming back to the topic, let me now drive through the key difference that 'sense and respond' paradigm brings into social CRM.

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

January 25, 2011

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

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?" »

January 17, 2011

Social CRM treasure hunt - can your social customer executives read the map?

For me, the first signs of the social stuff becoming serious flashed in my mind when I heard about a global 2000 company recruiting a role called 'social media manager' in early 2008 or so. And then we had Citibank, America express, General Motors,  Dell, Toyota, Samsung, Wells Fargo, NASA, Intel, LexisNexis and many more big corporations that seem to have now deployed a focused role of Social media management, some in form of additional  responsibility and few as dedicated one. Also, looks like our good friend and leading industry analyst Jeremiah Owyang has been tracking this role since 2007, almost an year earlier than when I noticed it first time. That definitely surprises me.

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

January 15, 2011

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) - A Good Test for Customer Loyalty

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" »

January 14, 2011

Social CRM - managing the accountability challenges for the customer interactions on social media

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" »

January 13, 2011

Social CRM - uprising of the Next-gen Customer Experience Designers

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" »

January 11, 2011

Are you waiting for the strategic big picture of the end-state social CRM?

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?" »

December 18, 2010

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

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 " »

July 22, 2010

Collaboration between diverse industries - Cloud offering for a retailer

Recently I happened to do shopping at one of the major retailer in India and was exposed to the latest trend in marketing - Collaboration between diverse industries!  Typically, we are mostly price conscious and are mostly bargain hunters. Guess what, the first unpaid mobile service being launched by the most innovative retail player in the market.

Continue reading "Collaboration between diverse industries - Cloud offering for a retailer" »

June 24, 2010

Maximizing Social Networking Value

CRM, as we see it, is all set to change. The problem is - we just don't know how. The popularity of social websites such as Twitter and Facebook have made many companies jump into the social bandwagon by opening up Twitter or Facebook accounts - for many, it is simply a brand building exercise; for some others, it is a casual attempt at customer relationship management - whether sending updates to followers on marketing events, or responding to sales or service inquiries. Still very few do exceedingly well in the new social sphere; most notable in Twitter are Southwest Airlines, Dell and JetBlue.

Continue reading "Maximizing Social Networking Value" »

June 22, 2010

Keeping pace with the Changing Face of CRM

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" »

May 21, 2010

CRM through Smart Phones

by Karthik Andhiyur Nagarajan

Though mobile phones sales declined worldwide due to the recession, the market share of smart phones has grown constantly and is expected to account for a major chunk of the mobile market in the next five years.

Does this have anything to do with CRM? Yes of course, these smart phones are simply sweeping off customers with incredible connections between the digital and the real world.

Continue reading "CRM through Smart Phones" »

March 23, 2010

Pegasystems acquisition of Chordiant - Can this result in an Oracle-type solution at a lower cost?

The recent acquisition of Chordiant by Pegasystems has created a lot of buzz in the CRM BPM space and several communities like the customer base, systems integrators, analysts are welcoming this news and watching the acquisition very closely to see how the synergy between the two companies would work out in the future and how they will collaborate to bring new products to market. While the deal will clearly provide synergies to both companies, it is also a function of the general consolidation in the CRM and BPM space. There has been a couple more acquisitions in the past in the BPM space i.e., IBM picked up Lombardi in December and Progress Software acquired Savvion earlier this year.

Continue reading "Pegasystems acquisition of Chordiant - Can this result in an Oracle-type solution at a lower cost?" »

March 22, 2010

Are Telcos becoming dumb pipes?

On 15th Feb an announcement was made in the Mobile World Congress held in Barcelona.Two dozen of the world's largest mobile-phone companies, including Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, Telecom Italia and Vodafone are teaming up to create an "open international applications platform," in direct response to Apple's success with its own iPhone App Store, Called the the "Wholesale Applications Community" (ref.).

On 17th, Google CEO has launched new mobile technology bits like how Google phones could already perform voice recognition and translate spoken phrases into different languages and claimed that people who don't even speak the same language will soon be able to have live conversations and Google phone cameras will translate items like foreign restaurant menus in seconds. (ref. ).

New Skype apps for the iPhone and Symbian platforms will allow mobile users to bypass telco voice networks completely, making calls using the internet over the 3G data network (ref.).

Continue reading "Are Telcos becoming dumb pipes?" »

March 18, 2010

Field Service: The way ahead - Part 1

by Shyamalee Pramod Samvatsar

In this era of product commoditization and soaring customer expectations, manufacturing companies are transforming their business model to reduce their dependence on product revenues and cash in on the demand for Services. Based on my experience and reading, I have noted the following trends in customer service:

Continue reading "Field Service: The way ahead - Part 1" »

March 14, 2010

Closing the loop on Marketers’ Holy Grail

Here is what Mark Killens had to say on my last blog post on functionality coverage in CRM products for Marketing Automation: “CRM systems and marketing are very important sales enablement resources. They both must include tools to manage and report on how marketing is helping and enabling sales and how to keep track of the customer after a sale closes”. Please find the post, the comment and my response here.

I perceive Mark’s comment as referring to one of the long standing challenges for Marketers – how do you attribute the end Sales revenues to the original Marketing efforts? This ability to tie the eventual revenues back to the campaigns, thereby closing the loop, has largely been either impossible or a difficult task to accomplish for Marketers - thus making it a Holy Grail.

Continue reading "Closing the loop on Marketers’ Holy Grail" »

March 11, 2010

Self Service for Cards Dispute Resolution – A means to increase profit margins and customer satisfaction

by Vinod Nag

A “dispute” in the context of credit cards pertains to questioning the validity of a card transaction. Most dispute complaints begin in a similar fashion - the card holder communicates with the card issuer bank through one of the channels – telephone, e-mails, direct mail (posts) etc. The customer service representative will then collect the necessary details and determines how this enquiry has to be dealt with.

Continue reading "Self Service for Cards Dispute Resolution – A means to increase profit margins and customer satisfaction" »

February 9, 2010

Customer Complaints and the Role of CRM

by Anshul Tiwari

We are living in an age where there is not only an abundance of information but also a massive flow of this information at an unprecedented rate. In this highly competitive and information rich world, the consumer is more aware than ever before. Steps have been taken both by the governments and NGOs in different countries to ensure that the consumer does not get exploited. A number of consumer awareness programs and campaigns have been taken up in earnest and every effort is made to make people aware of their rights and responsibilities.

Continue reading "Customer Complaints and the Role of CRM" »

January 8, 2010

Smartphones: The Need for ‘Smarter’ CRM

Customizability and Simplicity would be the distinguishing characteristics of smart-phone CRM applications.

“Hi,  I’ll take the iPhone”
“ Sir, Why don’t you try our other smart-phones models like…”
“ I’ll take the iPhone”
“..we have a special offers with monthly bill discounts, for these other models…”
“I’ll take the iPhone”
“ …Sir, we have received numerous service complaints with the iPhone and ..”
“I’ll take the iPhone”

Continue reading "Smartphones: The Need for ‘Smarter’ CRM" »

December 24, 2009

Oracle PIPs: Redefining Real Time Integration

I am sure a lot of us are already aware; few months ago Oracle released Process Integration Packs (PIP) based on Oracle Fusion Application Integration Architecture (AIA) framework. These PIPs establish pre-built integration between applications via AIA layer and are modeled on the SOA best practices. Through this article I have attempted to analyze the key features of the PIPs as well as the challenges that might surface while implementing.

Continue reading "Oracle PIPs: Redefining Real Time Integration" »

December 10, 2009

BSS in the cloud for MVNOs

Telecom Regulatory Authorities (TRAs) of different countries have successfully been able to leverage MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network operators ) to increase competition, decrease costs. This has been positioned as a “win-win-win-win” depending on how you look at it. TRAs achieve their objective of increased penetration & competition, Customers benefit due to price re-alignment, wireless operators with network operators benefit from increased network utilization and MVNOs from new business. The reality is a little different. While the customers benefitted and TRAs achieved their objectives, the other two stakeholders are struggling. But the concept is still dis-ruptive.

Continue reading "BSS in the cloud for MVNOs" »

November 18, 2009

Pharmacovigilance - Opportunity to Differentiate

The journey of drugs from molecule to shelf is a long one indeed. This highly regulated process is designed to both foster innovation and also minimize risks. The journey does not end after clinical trials are complete and the drug approved. Drug manufacturers have a legal duty to track and report adverse events throughout the drug lifecycle. This process has two key components – to collect and manage data from various touch points on medicine safety and then to analyze this data to detect signals of potential risks or manufacturing issues with the drugs. Based on this information, appropriate decisions, recalls, regulatory notifications, etc. need to be issued.

Continue reading "Pharmacovigilance - Opportunity to Differentiate" »

November 4, 2009

Social Media- a driving force behind product support and innovation

With more and more customers online and networking across continents … social media is slowly but surely getting in to the next avatar where it is now being seen as a powerful medium to look at rather than just being another “Friend-Friend” fun time app space.

In the recent past we have seen a lot of serious talk about Social CRM,  Social Marketing, Crowd Service… and many more , a few of these have not only been able to create hype around in the blogosphere but have also had  leading Analysts take a notice, recent analyst reports suggest that by 2010, more than half of large corporations will have some form of online community that can be used for customer relationship purposes.

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November 3, 2009

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

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" »

October 30, 2009

Simplicity in CRM - The Way Ahead?

While around the globe, there are newer solutions and integrations coming up for CRM, the thought which needs to be foremost under consideration is simplicity. Is that the truth or is it ok to have a complex CRM presentation?      

Continue reading "Simplicity in CRM - The Way Ahead?" »

October 23, 2009

Bill and Sell

A bill sent to a customer from the telecom service provider is a powerful tool of customer communication. Hope you agree to this fact. The 'Power of the Bill' can be unleashed in multiple ways. Mainly, for the operator’s revenue increase by means of cross selling and up selling. Cross selling and up selling can be effectively increased through the bill. The target product segment can vary, and cross selling and up selling strategy would differ based on the product segment- whether it is 3G mobile, Wifi Broadband, WiMax and so on.

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October 8, 2009

Is Customer Experience a lone ranger?

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?" »

September 14, 2009

Customer Surveys – The Magic Bullet in Customer Loyalty Management?

Customer Surveys are an effective tool, not only to measure but also to foster Customer Loyalty.

As helpful as it would have been, there is no magic bullet to promote customer loyalty!
It still, pretty much is  achieved by sticking to marketing basics, ie, having a great product/service, providing superior customer experience, imparting high quality customer service, building favorable brand perception/awareness and engaging customers continuously.

Continue reading "Customer Surveys – The Magic Bullet in Customer Loyalty Management?" »

September 11, 2009

Increasingly available customer generated qualitative data in the cloud and implications for Market Research

I recently came across a research forecast that marketers would shave off 9.5% from market research spend over 2009, reversing a 20-year trend of annual spending increases. It appeared in Marketing Week and here is the link. The article highlights the following as one of the research findings:  "….while survey data and company sales data continue to be used by nearly all market research professionals, other methods, such as focus groups, syndicated research and scanner data, have all experienced decreases. For instance, use of focus group data has dropped from 80% for the past two years to 74% to date for 2009."

While I do not know the reason for the drop in usage of focus group data (the research, the full report of which I have not seen yet, might have some pointers), to my mind, this inflection may point to a long term trend for focus groups. I believe that the increasingly available customer generated qualitative data around attitudes, preferences, opinions, reviews, etc. in the Cloud - specifically the Social Media - will eventually lead to that.

Continue reading "Increasingly available customer generated qualitative data in the cloud and implications for Market Research" »

September 4, 2009

Will the routing of contacts in future be done only by CRM?


Along with the current trend of universal queuing and multichannel contact routing, CRM applications are also becoming capable of queuing and routing of contacts to the right, suitable and available agent.

We can categorize the routing in broadly 2 categories:
1) Manual (rarely used) or automatic routing (widely used)
2) Skill based (rarely used) and rule based routing (widely used)

If we focus on automatic and rule based routing, it actually works depending on where we are defining the rules i.e. in the contact center (CC) application or the CRM application. Most of the time we see the rules are defined in the CRM application because they play a significant part in deciding on the routing capability, making routing functionality in  the contact center application redundant.

Continue reading "Will the routing of contacts in future be done only by CRM?" »

September 1, 2009

Service Failures

Is an occasional service failure desirable? I know it sounds ridiculous but the best laid plans of men and mice often go awry. And so is the case with the best amongst the service plans.

 

Continue reading "Service Failures" »

August 31, 2009

Why do companies implement CRM and other such questions - Part I

When it comes to CRM failures almost everyone has a reason (and a scapegoat as wellSmile) and also a figure (from 20% to 80% failure rate) but not many would try and ask themselves why did we go in for CRM? And even if you do ask this question to executives of a company which lives and breathes “Customer Relationship” they will give you a wide variety of answers like “To listen to our customers” or “To respond to competition” or “Our top management asked us to” to even “We had surplus IT budget”

Continue reading "Why do companies implement CRM and other such questions - Part I" »

August 27, 2009

How Secure is SaaS now?

Over the years SaaS has been revolutionizing the software industry and the advantages are well documented. One of the main deterrents of this fastest growing deployment model is regarding the security the SaaS applications have to offer. While more efficiency in terms of private clouds and on demand solutions are looked at by companies mostly due to the significant reduction in maintenance costs and other associated benefits, the single most important deciding factor in these IT initiatives continues to be the security of the deployed systems.

Continue reading "How Secure is SaaS now?" »

Telecommuting -- are today's CRM technologies capable?

Telecommunications started with the plain old telephony service (POTS). Then came mobile services followed by broadband over copper cable. Right now fiber to the cabinet/premises is the trend with British Telecom taking the lead in this. Also recently we have been listening to the buzz words like ICTs, telecommuting and softcos.

Continue reading "Telecommuting -- are today's CRM technologies capable?" »

August 25, 2009

Cloud Computing and Software as a Service Applied?

Remember the days of Applied Engineering. Each of us was inspired by concepts of Applied Mechanics, Applied Thermodynamics, Applied consulting etc. It gave us an opportunity to explore the concept in a real time scenario. It is always with excitement, one enters the thermo dynamics labs to explore concepts of applied engineering. Time has come for us to break away and evaluate what the term applied cloud computing and applied Software as a Service means?

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August 17, 2009

Factors driving selection of the CRM Application

In today’s dynamic scenario, stiff competition is driving businesses to improve the customer experience to retain the market share. Most of the times, customers invest heavily on improving their CRM applications without knowing the factors that will determine success of their CRM program. Hence many a times the CRM implementations fail to deliver the desired outcome.

 

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August 4, 2009

The Ultimate Customer Master: A ripening opportunity

The Context 

One of the core components of a CRM system is customer data. The system maintains both transactional data (the data around the relationship with the individual) and personal data (the data about the individual per se).

Once an individual is established as a customer in a CRM system, all the transactional data – like interactions, opportunities to sell products and services to the customer, products and services actually sold, issues with them, resolution to those issues, etc. - is captured and maintained in the system.

However, the personal data typically comes from the individual. It is collected from the customer himself (unless gotten in a list with some amount of personal details) during the process of setting him up as a customer in the system. There could be exceptions like collection of data on credit worthiness, which could come from credit monitoring agencies. While the process of managing this data is not exactly one with numerous pain points, there are opportunities for improvement both from the perspective of the customer and that of the companies.

From the perspective of the customer, for instance, he needs to go through the details all over every time he sets up a relationship with a new company. And every time he changes his address, he needs to call up the companies and update. Would it not be better if the individual can keep updating the data in one system - the Ultimate Customer Master - and let the companies subscribe to it either on a going or an ad-hoc basis?

From the perspective of the company, for instance, the data becomes stale over a period of time. While basic data like date of birth remain static, others like mailing address keep changing. Companies don’t have a foolproof way of keeping the data up to date – unless the customer himself calls and provides an update. Contacting the customers on a periodical basis to keep this information up to date could be both expensive and time consuming for the companies. Besides, the customer may get annoyed as well. Would it not be better to have a central repository - the Ultimate Customer Master - which can supply this data to companies at the click of a button?

Continue reading "The Ultimate Customer Master: A ripening opportunity" »

July 31, 2009

Twitter’s Potential as a CRM Tool

Twitter – This concept has been so much in news these days, that it was a matter of time before I deep dived into it. Well, you can call me a laggard but I am not to be blamed for living in a cyber odyssey where every second day a new social networking site mushrooms, sending me an invite to join. So by the time I joined Twitter, I realized that it has already taken the world by storm.

Continue reading "Twitter’s Potential as a CRM Tool" »

July 23, 2009

Win win for Customers and Service Providers

My earlier blog Convergence: The Customer Perspective focused on an in-depth analysis on the market.

As I sat pondering on my phone call to the customer service department – in the context of the focus on CRM, I felt two interesting trends emerging.

From the past of having multiple steps in the process of reaching a customer agent, slowly the scene seems to be changing – calls are picked up directly by the call center agent. Have found it to be happening more often than usual and as a user am pleasantly surprised.

Continue reading "Win win for Customers and Service Providers" »

July 22, 2009

Facing Re-Implementation vs. Upgrade dilemma for your CRM systems?

For a long time, enterprises have been embracing CRM initiatives for different reasons and over the period have been building up functional capabilities on top of those systems. These capabilities that were being built have often made the applications more complex to manage and enhance. Over a period of time, however, these enterprises are bound to cross through a juncture at which they will be forced to take a decision on whether to upgrade or re-implement their existing CRM packaged application(s) to leverage the capabilities from the latest product offerings. While this is the case, each enterprise might have different reasons and criteria to decide between these two approaches, some of which include but not limited to, leverage additional functional capabilities, beat competition in the market place, reduce time to market, streamline & improve process efficiencies, meet the changing industry trends, enable regulatory compliance, leverage technological advancements etc. I would like to discuss some of the key aspects that I think; an enterprise should consider before choosing between these two options and would be using Oracle’s Siebel CRM application as my example.

 

Continue reading "Facing Re-Implementation vs. Upgrade dilemma for your CRM systems?" »

July 16, 2009

Service Bureau based outsourcing – A win win approach for Indian Telecom service providers

Can anyone tell me how many Telecom Service Providers are there in a Circle/State in India as on Date? It is an intricate question to answer given the scale of expansion in the Indian Telecom Market and a new operator being added day on day.

Indian Telecom market is one of the fastest growing markets in the world. The Indian Telecom service providers have come a long way since 1994 when the Telecom sector was liberalized by the government and in 1995 GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) Mobile Telephony entered India. In the last 14 years, the telephone density has soared from a mere 0.8% to above 33% and the total subscriber base has grown to more than 384 million with just the mobile subscriber base being over 346 million. With the increasing adoption of Telecom services, it is imperative that the existing and new Telecom service providers improve their operational efficiency continuously.

 

Continue reading "Service Bureau based outsourcing – A win win approach for Indian Telecom service providers" »

Implementing CRM without ERP in Manufacturing Industry

Going back to ERP vendors pre-take over(read merger and acquisitions) era, CRM and ERP was well segregated in the usage of applications.The CRM suite usually meant marketing, sales and service applications while anything other than these was ERP applications .Few years back ,a lot of ERP vendors realized that separating these two was not giving any substantial benefit to the implementing organizations. Not to mention in lot of cases it was an opportunity lost for these vendors as customers would never think of a single product vendor for both of these applications. 

CRM application alone was nothing more than a desktop(or analytical)application which defied the entire purpose of implementing CRM or ERP.

Continue reading "Implementing CRM without ERP in Manufacturing Industry" »

July 13, 2009

Social CRM: The place where everyone wants to be

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" »

July 10, 2009

What are customers are really looking for from Communication Service Providers (CSPs)?

Today, globally the Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are facing challenges in terms of reduced average revenue per user, stiff competition - due to reduced price and service differentiation, advancement in technology, change in government policy/guidelines, and customer demands, to name a few.

As users of telecom services in our day today life, I have listed down some of the best practices which Customers would look for from the CSP’s during various stages of the life cycle...

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July 9, 2009

People Change Management – A prerequisite to successful CRM Implementation

People Change Management is one of the most important task that determine the success of the CRM Implementation. As we know, most of the people are reluctant to change because of factors like sense of insecurity, inherent inertia, insufficient knowledge about the change etc. Hence it is very essential to plan for the People Change Management well in advance before the CRM Implementation (in fact right from the time we capture business requirements) otherwise people (front office / back office people) will either reject the new CRM Application or will start complaining about it. It is very important to address some of the questions coming to their mind like:

Continue reading "People Change Management – A prerequisite to successful CRM Implementation" »

July 3, 2009

RoI in CRM Projects

One of the most often heard grievance about CRM Implementation is that it doesn’t deliver its promised value. After putting in months of efforts both by the implementation partner and the client, an absence of RoI would be dismal – more so in the current financially pressing times.

 

Continue reading "RoI in CRM Projects" »

How is Intelligence CRM (ICRM) different from Analytical CRM (ACRM)?

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)?" »

June 30, 2009

‘Anyone’ Relationship Management

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.

Continue reading "‘Anyone’ Relationship Management" »

June 25, 2009

How ICRM can aid in decision support for enhancing customer relationships

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" »

June 19, 2009

Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 4

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" »

Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 3, Sessions, product launches are the theme of the day

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.

Continue reading "Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 3, Sessions, product launches are the theme of the day" »

June 18, 2009

Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 2, Buzz around testing automation

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.
 

Continue reading "Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 2, Buzz around testing automation" »

Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 1 – Best solution award for Infosys’ Siebel BPT solution

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)

Continue reading "Notes from HP Software Universe 2009, Las Vegas: Day 1 – Best solution award for Infosys’ Siebel BPT solution" »

June 16, 2009

Where Is SaaS Heading?

"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.

Continue reading "Where Is SaaS Heading?" »

June 12, 2009

Business Process Testing – Next Generation Solution for Siebel Automation Testing

My previous post on business process testing touched upon some of the challenges being faced by companies in testing automation. In this post I will touch upon some more testing automation challenges and go into details around our solution for overcoming these challenges.

Continue reading "Business Process Testing – Next Generation Solution for Siebel Automation Testing" »

June 11, 2009

Convergence: The Customer Perspective

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.

Continue reading "Convergence: The Customer Perspective" »

June 9, 2009

Where is CRM on the Cloud?

On Demand applications have long been the ‘Cloud’ face of CRM. This software as a service model still is the fastest growing CRM application deployment model. There have been numerous arguments about the feasibility and the cost effectiveness of the SaaS model. Nevertheless, the technology has developed over the last decade and users now are fully aware of how the model can play into their CRM roadmap. Then the storm began to brew over the ‘Cloud’. A pertinent question keeps popping up every now and then: Is SaaS Cloud Computing? For a more detailed view on this please read the blog on Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?

Continue reading "Where is CRM on the Cloud?" »

June 8, 2009

Business Process Testing - The future of package testing ?

 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 ?" »

June 6, 2009

Empowering the Next Generation Call Agent

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?

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June 3, 2009

Has your SaaS TCO changed?

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.

Continue reading "Has your SaaS TCO changed?" »

June 2, 2009

Social Networks in Business and Commerce - Is it Unprecedented?

With S-commerce, S-networks, S-Analytics and S-CRM and S-anything being the buzzword I wanted to take a step back and analyze whether all this is truly path-breaking innovation? 

Continue reading "Social Networks in Business and Commerce - Is it Unprecedented?" »

June 1, 2009

Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?

There have been pertinent questions and interesting line of thoughts for the first post on Cloud Computing “Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?”. We will try to put things into perspective one by one. Firstly, lets deal with the confusion related to SaaS. Is SaaS same as cloud computing? More broadly, why is online video streaming, photo sharing and every, literally every, little thing available on the internet are being given as examples of Cloud Computing. Experts and hardliners may not necessarily like the idea of calling everything under the sun as Cloud.

Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 2: How is Cloud Computing different from SaaS?" »

May 29, 2009

Investing in Customers, during Recession

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" »

Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 3.

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." »

May 20, 2009

Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 2.

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." »

May 17, 2009

SAAS - Where is the money, honey?

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.

Continue reading "SAAS - Where is the money, honey?" »

May 7, 2009

Open Source CRM - An Alternative to Hosted Models - Part 1.

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." »

April 13, 2009

User adoption - A key yardstick for CRM success

"People" is a crucial element of any organization's IT strategy. Ignore their needs at your peril. Unfortunately in the quest to design the perfect system more importance is placed on the software package that is to be implemented, hardware capabilities required to run the dream package and process modification to achieve better business results rather than on end user inputs and buy-in for the new system.

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March 11, 2009

Software as a Service - Maturity model and a way of Life for Small and Medium Business?

Software as a Service (SaaS) exploded into the market during the early 2000, however only non -core application have sufficient level of traction using the SaaS model. During the nascent phase of the SAAS buzz cycle, many CIO’s jumped into the band wagon hoping to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by going for a subscriber model or license fee (based on volumes) based model for utilizing non-core application E.g. Marketing life cycle management, Partner Accreditation System, Human resource and performance management, CRM solutions etc. However with the advent of Sarbanes Oxley and the need for transparency of data updates (organizational data hosted within organization and by SAAS providers) along with rampant case of Security breach of critical data during data management (storage, transmission and hosting from the organization to the SAAS provider) many organization has planned to manage such processes internally or have plans of pulling back SAAS implementation in-house.

Continue reading "Software as a Service - Maturity model and a way of Life for Small and Medium Business?" »

March 2, 2009

Investment in CRM - Is it relevant NOW?

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.

 

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February 19, 2009

Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?

Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.

Continue reading "Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?" »

February 13, 2009

Patient relationship management

Around twenty billion has been earmarked for digitization of medical records by the US government. One of the primary drivers for the increased emphasis on the IT adoption is to reduce Medicare costs. Enabling IT would improve productivity of the Health delivery service organizations.  

 

Health Organizations have always concentrated on physicians their sole customers. Bringing Patients into ambit of "customer" would provide a comprehensive view to these delivery organizations. The new "customer" definition will improve efficiency and effectiveness of the service especially around customer / patient enquiries, patient interaction management, 360 degree view of the patient et al. Most of the initiatives around a comprehensive patient management are still in its infancy. Data definition management around the "customer" is the first step for Health delivery organizations to build an optimal, efficient and a cost effective process.

February 11, 2009

Strategies for Vertical CRM Requirements/demands

CRM, the term is old enough as an application area. Across the broader market, lots of vendors are moving towards verticalization including Oracle and SAP. Businesses are relying more heavily on vertical solutions to address the demands of current economic climates and to take advantage of the next iterations of the technology.  

It is well known that companies within the same vertical will have some unique requirements. So even a vertical application will require some tailoring. Implementing an appropriate vertical application in a given industry provides many benefits to a horizontal solution. It (Vertical application) enables ease of implementation and lowers cost of implementation. Recently I have read through a white paper 'Oracle Vertical CRM Applications: Realizing Business Benefit Through Industry Best Practices' by Mary Wardley published in Oracle website.

The author has explained the two strategies for addressing the demands of vertical business requirements:

1. Purchase a horizontal solution and customize it to their requirements - In this case the customer is purchasing a product for which the supplier's stated strategy is to maintain one code base and iteratively expand its functionality over time. To address specific vertical industry customers, these vendors will customize the software each time.

2. Purchase a vertical solution and tune it to their requirements - In this case, the customer is purchasing a product for which the vendor has committed to supporting specific vertical solutions for each market segment. The horizontal application is often the base code, and this code is iteratively upgraded into specific vertical-focused products.

At high level I am under the impression that vertical CRM applications are easy to implement and upgrade instead of buying a horizontal CRM application (licenses). 

What about your ideas on the above mentioned two approaches? Would like to know if there is any other approach?

February 9, 2009

‘Customer Experience’ – is it complicated?

This seemingly naïve question has been troubling me after yet another recent, not-so-pleasant air trip. I continue to think of ‘customer experience’ every time I fly (and can possibly write a book every time I travel a never-ending international segment!). I don’t know when this association between airlines and customer experience started for me personally; maybe because this is one industry that has never made me say ‘wow’. Maybe I wasn’t a part of the miracle on the Hudson!

 

Continue reading "‘Customer Experience’ – is it complicated?" »

January 29, 2009

The Super Bowl, Sports Management and CRM

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.

Continue reading "The Super Bowl, Sports Management and CRM" »

January 16, 2009

CRM Dilemma during this recession

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.

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