2009 October | CRM-Toolkit.com

Avoiding CRM Failure

If you’re evaluating a CRM suite in particular, you may have heard a lot of horror stories about CRM investments going to waste. Rest assured, it’s not the technology; cases of outright technology failure are rare in e-business, and their heyday was years ago, when a lot of applications were in their early generations.

Much more often, CRM failure has to do with the old saying, much beloved of coaches, that goes, Fail to plan, plan to fail. This is the point emphasized by Mike Murphy, executive director of Siebel Global Services. Addressing his company’s CRM audience some months ago, Murphy remarked, “If you focus on technology as the only aspect of a customer-facing solution, you’re going to have a fairly high-risk project.”

This truism of CRM has been out there for years, but it seems not all adopters have paid attention. “People frequently do not take into account the lessons of those that have gone before them,” Murphy tells Line56. “They will ignore some of the warnings.”

It’s part of a larger pattern in which CRM adopters haven’t conducted due diligence about the state of their own company, or of customers. Take the case of Cisco, which bought hosted CRM from Salesforce.com but subsequently came to realize that user behavior rejected the tool in favor of existing applications. That’s something that the company should have known from the CRM get-go, either causing it to pass up Salesforce.com altogether or else paying increased attention to the change management needed to embed Salesforce.com.

That’s a case of not knowing how CRM users behave, but Murphy knows of plenty of other cases in which a customer strategy has been missing. “When we do a post-mortem on these projects, we see that a customer strategy is lacking, or isn’t linked to a corporate strategy.”

For example, a manufacturer might be tasked to use CRM to do order management in order to improve cross-sell numbers, but might not have segmented the customer base properly. The customers might be craving cross-divisional solutions, not the discrete products currently offered by the manufacturer. But you’d never learn this by implementing order management.

Murphy offers a simple, three-step guide to avoiding CRM failure: 1. Align IT and business about what CRM-addressable problems are, and what to do about them; 2. Articulate a customer strategy, and how it links to corporate goals as well as to the proposed CRM system; and 3. Define goals in a measurable way so you can track your progress.

That’s what you should have on your mind when you think about a CRM suite, or even a component tool. Otherwise, as Murphy says, you might end up with “the technology piece working, but no results.”

David Cowgill is a Senior CRM Marketing Manager in San Francisco.

Article Source: http://www.crmblogger.com/crm/2005/09/avoiding_crm_fa.html

For further information contact: David Cowgill CRM Blog Founder http://www.crmblogger.com

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The Importance of CRM Customer Relationship Management

One of the primary factors in the success of any company is the liaison it shares with its customers. CRM or Customer Relationship Management designates all features of interaction a company shares with its customer. This includes everything from sales to service.

CRM is basically a business strategy designed to accrue gains, generate revenue and cater to customer needs and satisfaction. With the e-media picking up pace, the manner in which companies approach their CRM strategies has greatly changed. This has even altered the consumer?s purchasing attitude. So these days CRM too has become a web based effort as most of the customer relationship is handled electronically.

The web based CRM service is more effective. Web-based CRM services mainly covers three areas of service- sales force automation, management of customer relationships and customer services and automated marketing.

A web-based CRM software is a web-based system used for contact management, marketing and sales support, project tracking and other tasks associated with CRM. This software enables teams and departments to share a central and fresh database. The software facilitates its users with an online contact manager and a project-tracking tool, either over the web or within the corporate intranet. With the aid of the CRM software you can view and manage contacts, customer?s record, hot leads, projects and left-out work, from anywhere and with any web-browser. Moreover unlike the intervening and needed to be testified upgrades of an enterprise software, the upgrades to the web based software do not affect the organization?s regular operations in any manner. Due to these features more and more companies are driven towards this web-based software.

Siebel Systems Inc., HydraNet and Push CRM are some eminent names in web-based software service. Lately SAP has also blessed the market with on-demand Customer Relationship Management solution. A web based CRM has many names out of which on-demand CRM is one.

These systems provide agents with the most up-to-date information on all customer service transactions. The software adds to the strategic value and business of the organization by automating sales, marketing and customer service. For instance the SAP product specializes in providing core sales-force automation features for managing customers, contacts and sales pipelines.

The software runs and keeps a complete track of your data after it is downloaded or purchased and then installed on your server or web-host. Usually the CRM software runs on all significant platforms such as Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Novell (6.5) and so forth. Since the software serves many purposes at the same time, it is quite expensive. However an incredible competition in the market has enabled the software seekers to exercise their choice to a certain extent.

In choosing a web-based CRM software it is important that the user should firstly analyze his or her budget or the budget of the organization. Secondly also check your organization?s partner ecosystems. A user-friendly hosted CRM system, an on premise version or the combo of both should follow this and finally try to go for software that can fit any type of user, any size company and in any industry.

Mansi Aggarwal recommends that you visit Web based CRM
for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mansi_Aggarwal

CRM Customer Relationship Management is one of the newest innovations in customer service today. CRM stands for customer relationship management and helps the management and customer service staffs cope with customer concerns and issues. CRM involves gathering a lot of data about the customer. The data is then used to facilitate customer service transactions by making the information needed to resolve the issue or concern readily available to those dealing with the customers. This results in more satisfied customers, a more profitable business and more resources available to the support staff. Furthermore, CRM Customer Relationship Management systems are a great help to the management in deciding on the future course of the company.

As mentioned, there is much data needed for the CRM system to work. These fields include the customer name, address, date of transactions, pending and finished transactions, issues and complaints, status of order, shipping and fulfillment dates, account information, demographic data and many more. This information is important in providing the customer the answer that he or she needs to resolve the issue without having to wait for a long time and without going to several departments. With just a few mouse clicks, a customer support representative for example can track the location of the customer?s package or order. This is infinitely better than the cumbersome process of tracking shipments previously. Furthermore, the customer service representative will also be able to see the previous concerns of the customer. This is a great help especially if the customer is calling about the same issue since he or she will not have to repeat the story all over again. This results in less time in resolving the issue, thus, higher productivity of the support staff.

CRM Customer Relationship Management systems are also important to the top management because it provides crucial data like customer satisfaction and efficiency of service by the frontline crews. A piece of customer relationship management software will also be able to generate the needed reports for product development or new concepts. Furthermore, this system will also be a great help for the top management in deciding the company?s future course of action, whether it involves phasing out one of the products on the shelves or making adjustments to one of the products sold.

The reports generated by CRM systems are also invaluable to your advertising and marketing planners, as they will be able to pinpoint which ideas works and which do not. Because of CRM systems, you will be able to release advertisements or plan marketing campaigns more in tune with your target market. This will also lead to more responses to your advertisement and a more effective marketing campaign.

Successful integration of a CRM Customer Relationship Management system in your company, however, might not be as easy as it seems. The following might give you an insight why CRM systems fail in some companies? Most companies fail to prepare for CRM systems. By this, I mean that most companies fail to integrate all the departments that need to share the information for it to be effective. Furthermore, CRM units scattered all over the company?s departments is often more effective than just making one big CRM department. This will ensure that each department will get the information and data that they need.

A CRM system will also help you a lot in expanding your business. As CRM systems are capable of handling enormous amounts of data, CRM systems will help you a lot in coping with the increased numbers of customers and data. With a CRM Customer Relationship Management system installed and properly utilized, you can be sure that all data is maximized and used to ensure that your business will be successful and your customers a lot more satisfied than before.

Steven Taylor is a Marketing Consultant to http://www.Retronix.com
– one of the most innovative and effective suppliers to the electronics & semiconductor industries. Services include BGA Rework
and De-Bug Services.

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Web Based CRM Guide 101

Mansi Aggarwal recommends that you visit Web based CRM
for more information.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mansi_Aggarwal

Improve Performance With Effective CRM

Today?s customer is not someone who merely decides to buy or not to buy. He is educated, well-informed, widely traveled, discerning and knows that he can always get it elsewhere at a price which he is more comfortable with. Gone are the days when a company rested happy if it sold a product or service to a customer.

Advertising and promotion were the only tools to inform, educate and attract new customers. Customization, break-neck competition amongst multiple-players, price wars and globalization ? all this and more have made marketing companies wary of not only wooing the new and potential customers but to retain them on a long term basis. Companies are spending significant amount of resources to track customer interactions and adding more value to the next.

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is also referred to as customer management or relationship marketing. Some people associate CRM specifically with those software applications that are installed to support CRM within a business, but CRM is more than a mere software, it is a way some leading companies are conducting their business. If you have an opportunity to integrate the tools of the CRM software with that of ERP, you have in your hands, a magnificent and powerful tool to handle a large database of customers, the interactions, their present and future choices and vital data on customer preferences and trends. It is no wonder then that many leading companies are busy in CRM integration within their business processes.

When do you know that your company is ready for CRM integration? To put it simply, when you have a large customer base and you wish to undertake preventive measures to retain their loyalties and you feel that you have the adequate product lineup even for any product or service upgrade. Come to think of it, in most interactions, both the customer and the company are faceless. The customer representative is probably the only person who has seen his face and knows his preferences. If only the product development, marketing and sales personnel of your organization knew what he is like and could give a face to this unknown entity, how meaningful the interaction it would be! Similarly, if only the young man who bought your laptop knew that within the next year, this company is coming up with a far improved version of the laptop, how convenient it would be for the customer!

CRM integration with your existing ERP systems would focus on building a loyal customer base through the creation and development of individual customer relationships. It lends a face to your company. Likewise, it makes the customer appear more ?human?. When all staff in an organization can access a customer’s history, it allows them to deliver better personalized service to the customer. This opens up a meaningful communication channel, between the two, which can be utilized profitably to educate, inform and court a customer for product upgrade, cross-sell, addressing grievances ? otherwise maintain a personalized contact.

CRM integration most importantly can add tremendous competitive advantage in an otherwise fiercely competitive market environment. It can open up a Direct Marketing channel of communication which has been found effective the world over.

Daniel Travers owns and operates http://www.ERP-benefits.com
Benefits Of ERP

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3 Steps to Successful CRM For Both Big and Small Companies

Regardless of your company’s size and the requirements for your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution, the goal remains the same: learn more about your customers and leverage that knowledge into increased customer loyalty and improved sales.

However, too often companies jump into their CRM initiatives without the proper thought and planning. The result? A CRM system that does not meet critical organizational needs and fails to provide the proper insights into their customer base. Or perhaps worse–a CRM system that is not used at all. The key to success for your CRM implementation is not just the technology driving your solution, but in the strategy itself.

To achieve CRM success, there are 3 steps every company must follow before starting to consider CRM technology:

1. Establish a commitment to organizational change. If your company already understands why it is essential to improve customer loyalty and agrees that a CRM initiative is a high priority, congratulations! If not, you’ll need to do the legwork necessary to achieve consensus with all teams. Don’t be overwhelmed. Use this as an opportunity to put the pieces of your CRM puzzle together–discovering where customer touch points interact, what information is important to whom and why, and to identify what current business processes seem inefficient to those tasked with executing them. Once each team feels heard, and their grievances documented, they will likely agree that change is a good thing. Then you not only have much of the critical information you need for your next step, you also have the capital to return to these folks for their buy-off when your CRM strategy is completed. Your next step?

2. Define specific adjustments to operations. This seems like a tall order, but it is the logical next step towards building a solid strategy that your entire organization can get behind and evangelize. We suggest creating a matrix of all the problems identified in the first step and the solutions that were discussed. Use this matrix to compare the challenges across departments and identify potential operational changes that would solve these issues. Do not think about how technology can support these solutions, just concentrate on the operational changes necessary–who needs to know what and when, what workflow will share critical information between departments, and what critical customer-facing actions should occur at the completion of each task. TIP: The biggest factor to building a solid CRM strategy is developing a standardized sales process that is based on best practices, can be implemented across your sales organization, and integrates tightly with marketing and operations. Armed with this information, you are ready to:

3. Document your CRM Strategy. Your strategy should identify the specific business problems that need to be addressed (based on your information gathering and prioritization exercises from the first 2 steps), define objectives whose results can be measured (to demonstrate the ROI of your implementation), and outline solid insight into how CRM will impact the company, current operations, and your customers. To ensure organizational buy-off, boil down your CRM strategy into these critical points: How will CRM improve the lives of its users? How will it increase productivity? How will it impact sales? It is this strategy you then take back to the key stakeholders for final buy-off. It is this strategy that you will arm yourself with when researching and evaluating all possible CRM solutions available to you.

Understanding what business problems you need to solve and how they impact your operations–while demonstrating company support for this initiative–will ensure a successful implementation of your CRM solution. Not only will you better understand the trade-offs that you will need to make with the technology you choose, you will be able to better evaluate customization requirements and recommendations made by your CRM partner. The time you spend planning and documenting your strategy will be well worth the results!

Go-To-Market Strategies is a resource center for sales and marketing professionals and business leaders. Our tools, templates, and services help companies achieve big aspirations with limited budgets.

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Small Business CRM – Fueling Large Scale CRM Growth

In the initial CRM rush of the 90’s, most SMB (small to medium sized businesses) were largely ignored. At that time, CRM was considered to be the forte of large enterprises. But soon, vendors noticed that a huge market was lying untapped in the SMB market. This realization has led to the creation of several high quality small business CRM solution.

A global market analyst by the name of Datamonitor expects the CRM market to spend about $2 billion by 2008. This is almost double of what is being spent today. The largest CRM market is EMEA which is expected to spend close to $600 million on customer relationship management applications.

The applications

When it comes to the small business customer relationship management applications, there is a considerable difference in CRM solutions and enterprise class CRM. But this difference is eliminated by the high quality functionalities that are included within the application at a fraction of the cost. This is one of the reasons why hosted CRM is becoming a global force.

The high capital costs were eliminated and a certain degree of flexibility was introduced into CRM applications.Today most vendors have a host of products for small businesses. Most of these products can be further tailored to meet the individual needs of the customers.

A far more competitive environment

This influx of customer relationship management into the small to medium sized business world has also led to far more precise business models. The overall environment has become far more competitive and healthier.

Revenue generation, customer service and channel management have reached the next level. Its customer focused business models that rule the roost today and it is to the benefit of the customer.

For more info visit : Small Business CRM

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Who Uses CRM?

CRM or customer relationship management is a set of processes that the business would use to successfully organise any contacts with current customers and potential customers. How this is done in each individual business is down to the owner of that business, but it usually involves all employees using a particular type of CRM software.

There are different CRM software providers on the market right now and it is down to business owners to decide which one is the best for them and their business. Many of the CRM software programs available have various features which can be used or disabled – so in effect a business can tailor make their own CRM solution. So who uses CRM?

An easy answer to that question would be to say “Any business with customers would use CRM” – but it is not always straightforward as that. Here are the type of businesses that could stand to benefit from using customer relationship management.

? Any businesses that have a sales team – as customer relationship management can help salespeople to identify various trends in their customers behaviour it can assist them when selling products.

? Any businesses that use any form of marketing – when using a good CRM solution businesses can use sales information from customers records to finely tune their marketing campaigns. Statistics have shown that targeted marketing is much more profitable than flooding as many markets as possible with marketing campaigns. Doing this not only wastes money, but it is also ineffective and inefficient.

? Any businesses that create quotes and invoices – having an inbuilt courting and invoicing tool on a software program that is used daily can really speed up the quality and invoicing process. Using just one software program to do everything in a business can increase productivity dramatically. No more switching between programs to complete tasks – everything can be done from one program.

? Any businesses that want to show their customers that they are a priority – customers like to feel as though they are wanted, and using CRM can do this. For example, even if a customer telephones a business and get through to the wrong department the person they speak to, can use their CRM program, find that customers details and transfer them through to the correct department in moments. This cuts down on customer frustration and make the customer feel as though that business really values them. It might seem like something small to a business, but when it happens in reality to customer it will stick with them and give them a better customer experience.

? Any businesses that want to increase efficiency – using just one CRM software program means that a great deal of time is saved each day.

As you can see there are number of reasons why any business would choose to use customer relationship management, and there are more. Using CRM provides numerous benefits to both businesses and customers and that is why so many businesses use CRM.

CRM
transforms Project Management
Software – get the tools you need to run your small business better, includes time tracking, documents and billing.

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CRM History – The Evolution of Better Customer Service

There was a time when frequent flyer miles, loyalty award systems and credit card points were virtually unknown to businesses and consumers alike. CRM history shows that customer relationship management is the system that popularized consumer benefits such as this.

CRM history is indeed a brief one when it comes to the technological aspect of customer service. Although marketing campaigns and strategies go back a long way, most entrepreneurs used to rely on generic means to attract potential customers and gain loyal ones. Before the dawn of CRM, most companies were not ingenious when it came to having personalized customer relationships.

The Dawn of CRM

CRM emerged in the 1980’s and this early version was called database marketing. Database marketing wasn’t as intricate as the well-developed CRM of today. It mainly comprises of an organizations’ customer service staff interacting with a company’s clients. Although helpful, it wasn’t exactly a seamless process and information on the existing database tended to be unorganized, hard to track, update and retrieve.

The Rise of CRM

CRM history shows that the 90’s saw great improvement in terms of Customer Relationship Management. Companies began to see the benefits of offering perks to customers and potential ones in exchange for relevant customer information or for repeat purchases. Companies also began to regard customer service as a continuously evolving skill rather than a stagnant service to be picked up and used whenever necessary.

A Fully-developed CRM

Today, CRM has reached its full potential, allowing businesses to maximize their own potentials as well, to achieve superior customer service. More advanced tools are made available and innovation allows customization of software to fit a particular business or industry. Benefits enjoyed by customers such as bonus points and loyalty rewards are also advantageous to the companies that award these benefits: now they can easily track the behavior, spending history and patterns of their customers.

With CRM’s online capabilities, storage issues for huge databases can now be resolved, especially for big corporations. CRM software developers are now offering offsite storage of data and opening secure Internet mediums for staging CRM.

CRM is most useful for organizations whose success depend vastly on technology or customer service. That’s why a lot of CRM-based tools and software are utilized by credit card companies, the telecommunications industry and even the computer hardware and software sectors. From customer acquisition, to trouble shooting and encouraging customer loyalty, CRM will be a useful system to achieve these goals.

CRM history has indeed shown that something truly useful and effective can come a long way in such a short time. As long as businesses continue to thrive on effective management of customer relationships and as long as there are customers to satisfy, then CRM will also continue to develop and evolve to greater heights.

As shown by CRM history, customer relation management has indeed empowered consumers to choose the companies worth patronizing. CRM has made customer service a global interaction so consumers can now easily switch to better services if unsatisfied with current one.

Gain an insight on CRM history
and the latest on customer relationship management news
and CRM pitfalls
. Visit http://www.CRM-Software-Guide.com
today.

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Open Source CRM For Small Business

Today, small and mid-size business owners are using open source CRM software to help streamline their business processes with the expectation of generating more sales opportunities. Open source CRM solutions should be able to manage existing customers, facilitate prospecting, generate online sales leads, launch and track marketing campaigns, analyze customer needs and preferences, integrate with existing applications and provide secure access to company data from any computer with an Internet connection and a browser.

Here are a few keys to selecting the right CRM solution:

• Ensure the CRM software you choose has the ability to capture all relevant customer and sales related information. At a minimum, your CRM solution must be able to easily record all interactions with your customers. One of the major benefits of CRM software is in its ability to help collect, store and share data to all appropriate areas in your business — in real-time.

• Before you deploy a CRM tool you must first understand your existing sales and marketing workflow. Your CRM tool must be able to integrate with your existing processes or your sales and marketing team will not use it.

• It is imperative to understand the level of customization you will require. Do you have the required technical skills on staff to implement modifications? Does the CRM tool provide an API (application programming Interface) for extending the platform? Will custom changes prevent future upgrade options? Answering these questions in advance will save you time and money later.

• Determine if the CRM tool can integrate with applications used by your staff. For example, you must know whether the CRM tool can share or exchange data with your email client (e.g. Outlook or Thunderbird). You must also know if the CRM tool provides an easy to use import or export function for data mining and other sales analysis functions.

• Determine the level of support you will require. Most open source providers make their money on service and support rather than software sales. Therefore, you should investigate the various levels of support provided by the open source vendor.

• Research the level and quality of third party extensions. Quite often companies are able to find free or low cost extensions and avoid the expense of internal development. Third party extensions can add needed functionality and save your business time and money. For example, third party payment modules have become a necessary component for accepting electronic payment at the point of sale.

While there are many open source CRM products to choose from here are my top six:

1. SugarCRM
2. vtiger CRM
3. SplendidCRM
4. CentricCRM
5. XRMS CRM
6. ZOHO CRM

Be sure to test drive multiple open source CRM tools before deciding which open source CRM application to deploy.

Ricky Bracken is President & CEO of SaleManager Merchant Services. SaleManager provides enterprise class payment solutions to small and mid-size businesses. SaleManager payment solutions include a Payment Gateway Service
, Mobile Payment Solutions, POS Terminals, Retail & Restaurant payment solutions
, Certified Shopping Carts and CRM payment modules.

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Microsoft CRM Services For Your Business

No names to spare the blushes of the poor CEO who posted it. But I just could not resist quoting and commenting on this question from Linked In.

Is Your CRM Lying To You

“Let me begin by saying that we use ?????? and LOVE IT. However, what we find is that in many cases the data that sales reps load into our CRM is outdated and does not reflect the true value of the sales pipeline. It appears that statistically, about 80% of deals in a pipeline are dead, thus the analogy “Is your CRM lying to you?”.

Obviously the software is not lying, but the data you are relying on might be. I’m curious what experience others have had with the accuracy of pipeline information and how you’ve gone about cleansing/validating pipeline data?”

My Thoughts?

This guy badly needs some help.

He’s paying a bunch of money to sales managers and sales reps, and presumably the CRM vendor..

In return he’s getting complete garbage! Worst of all he’s displaying his own ignorance and corroborating the Peter Principle. What a mess.

These guys obviously bought a marketing message from somebody – “Use this software and your incompetent sales organization will suddenly transform into sales management best practice.

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