CRM Software

These are “interesting times” for firms considering or employing customer relationship management (CRM) strategies and the enabling solutions. A slow economy has boosted the need for CRM to cost-effectively grow revenues by focusing resources on the most valuable customers while taking care to avoid neglecting the others: which form the bulk of the volume if not in individual sales.

At the same time companies are facing with managing customers that are coming out them from newer and new channels: mobile and social, with the latter’s ability to make or break brands and shift demand with “likes” and “dislikes” at the speed of light via public comments. This is while corporate resources are stretched, requiring the solutions to be low cost, quick to implement and easy to use.

To get a handle on these issues and trends TMCnet recently interviewed Florian Vogel, who is head of U.S. Operations at Update CRM, which since 1988 has been providing industry-specific CRM solutions.

TMCnet:         What key trends are you seeing in CRM demand and applications and what are the drivers?

FV:      While expanding the customer base remains important, building on the relationships to existing customers in order to identify potential opportunities for revenue growth has become the top priority for many established companies. It can enable them to weather the current economic crisis unscathed, ideally emerging in a stronger position once the storm settles.

This is the main reason for the remarkable success of the market for SaaS (News - Alert) [software-as-a-service] CRM solutions: by providing ways and means to improve both the quality and the profitability of customer relationships at a more predictable cost, they have become a crucial building block of enterprise IT strategies.

However, what we also see is that many SaaS CRM offerings, while transparently priced in terms of per-user subscription fees, still bear risks. A “plain vanilla” CRM solution will require customizations before it can optimally support a company’s processes, especially in strongly regulated markets. This usually results in inherently risky IT projects that may blur the overall cost picture.

Another issue is the common practice of asking companies to enter 12-to-24-month contracts – so while your CRM application may indeed be provided as a service, it is not really provided on demand – at least not should demand decrease!

This is precisely why we added a “methodology” and service to our update.seven product to create update.revolution, released in 2010. We believe that the CRM needs of any customer evolve over time and adjustments need to be made. This should not incur added costs, and customers have responded positively to that philosophy.

Needless to say, developments such as the social Web/social media or the rise of smartphones and tablet computing means that radically new demands are placed on the functional breadth of CRM solutions, beyond the mere deployment model. We have worked hard to keep up, and last year released both an iPad applications (we had previously released an application for the iPhone (News - Alert)) and Cosmic, a social media integration module for our CRM platform. Both we results of customer demand for more mobility and social integration. In our primary industry, life sciences, the iPad application especially has seen great response, and we expect demand for those kinds of mobility enhancing features to continue to rise in the coming years.

TMCnet:         Businesses and consumers are going mobile, and social. Is it now possible to untether the smartphones? How have going from 1-to-1 to 1-to-many i.e. social affected CRM strategies?

FV:      Mobility and Social are two key technology drivers of modern enterprise software.

On one hand, businesses are looking to equip their mobile salespeople with the best available tools, with the aim of improving both efficiency and effectiveness. In order to strengthen 1-to-1 relationships, it is crucial for these salespeople to always have the most relevant and up-to-date information at hand, and for this information to be easily accessible. In face to face interactions with customers, tablets such as the iPad can offer a simple, attractive and non-intrusive way to present information as well as enter new data. When on the go, salespeople expect customer data to be but one click away in order to quickly get ready for a call, or responding to a customer request – whatever it may be and whenever it may come. There is no question that currently available devices are capable of meeting these demands, if the right applications are provided. This explains why a CRM vendor’s mobile offering has become a key criteria when selecting a CRM application.

On the other hand, the rise of social media and social networking platforms is affecting CRM strategies in many ways. 1-to-many and many-to-many relationships between companies and their customers have gained dramatic importance, forcing companies to rethink how they communicate with their markets, especially in terms of content, transparency and speed. Many companies that struggle with the operational aspects of social CRM are taking a cautious approach and waiting for best “social” practices to emerge, only to realize that the conversation is already going on – without them.

That was the key component in Cosmic (Comprehensive Observation of Social Media Integrated with CRM), a social CRM integration module we released last year. We didn’t want to provide just another social platform, but we wanted to provide an integration tool that would marry social media tools with CRM in a way that would make both better. But putting social practices into a traditional business environment such as CRM, we were able to provide a base for social media best practices and actually enable customers to use social media in a meaningful way.

It is also important to note that mobile and social are inextricably linked: as smartphones establish themselves as the dominant class of personal communication devices, social rides “piggyback”: virtually every new smartphone comes with at least one “social” application pre-installed.

TMCnet:         Regarding social mediaoutline what appears to be the evolution of the customer from "Mad Men" mass marketing, to 1 to 1, and to 1 to many i.e. the social customer. Are we not going back to the traditional town markets?

FV:      Social media is indeed subjected to dynamics that are in some way similar to those of the town market, but on a much larger scale.

Mass marketing – as an essentially one-way form of communication – means pushing your brand and its message to large portions of your market, and hoping to see results manifested in the form of increased sales. 1 to 1 marketing, crucial in the business-to-business space, is the attempt to add a personal and conversational element to the relationship – you talk to your customer individually, both presenting your (hopefully tailored) offering as well as listening to his or her specific needs and answering questions.

In the social media space, you are dealing with a potentially very large number of people, including your customers, your prospects, your competitors and other stakeholders in your market. At the same time, you are expected to be transparent and engage in relevant conversations, without compromising on the quality of the relationship. In that sense, social media marketing efforts must combine aspects of mass marketing as well as of 1-to-1 marketing. But the radical difference introduced by social media is the many-to-many aspect: your customers won’t wait until they’re asked to talk about you or your products. They may already be doing it now, and while you cannot control such conversations, you should definitely not ignore them. What companies must try to ensure is that they become a marketing asset rather than a liability.

TMCnet:         CRM installations have been characterized as slow and expensive; sometimes the lead times have been so long the problems they were purchased to solve have disappeared. Are you seeing companies shorten the go-live and payback/ROI times and if so by how much today as compared to a year or 18 months ago? What CRM methods i.e. modular, hosted are buyers seeking in response? Discuss the advantages and challenges of these alternatives.

FV:      The rise of SaaS CRM is due mainly to its potential ability to significantly shorten time-to-solution and the more controllable costs. However, the issues that plagued on-premise CRM implementation projects in the past (and other enterprise IT projects, for that matter) do not magically disappear simply by choosing a SaaS solution. The need for extensive customization, coupled with the tendency to adopt a “Waterfall”-type model when planning and executing a CRM implementation project, often results in long project cycles, higher than expected project costs, over-engineered applications and ultimately unhappy users. Regardless of the deployment model.

So while SaaS is undeniably a crucial component in the attempt to improve ROI, it is not, per-se, a silver bullet. Other aspects, such as the vertical focus of the out-of-the-box solution and the applied project methodology are equally – if not more – important.

What we have seen over the last years is that CRM projects governed by agile methods and based on vertical application templates provide value faster, and also age better. By focusing on the most valuable functions first, and only subsequently expanding the scope of their applications, companies can achieve better user acceptance while ensuring that money is not wasted implementing functions that are of less use and needlessly clutter the system. If done right, deploying a state-of-the-art CRM application in a matter of weeks is entirely possible. That is why we wholeheartedly believe in a “walk before you run” mentality as the key to CRM success.

TMCnet:         What solutions have you and will be coming out in response to these trends? What has been the feedback from your customers?

FV:      It is with the aforementioned trends and issues in mind that we launched our update.revolution offering. By combining our update.seven SaaS CRM Solution, highly refined vertical application templates, a unique, results-focused project methodology and a pricing model which includes a broad scope of services within the subscription fees, we are able to provide our customers the most value at the lowest possible risk and within the shortest time frames.

At the same time, we are also focusing on other market defining trends. The update.revolution CRM application is available in off-line mode for laptop-equipped salespeople, while a family of mobile applications offers CRM functionality on any smartphone or tablet. Our award-winning update.touch product was the first CRM application on the market created specifically for the Apple (News - Alert) iPhone, and has recently been enhanced for the Apple iPad as well as for other tablets. As the interest for enterprise tablets and smartphones is shooting through the roof, so is the demand for update.touch – and the feedback from our customers overwhelmingly positive.

With update.COSMIC we are addressing the need for companies to integrate social media with both their CRM as well as their IT strategies. COSMIC essentially treats public social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook (News - Alert) as well as Forums and Blogs as a new communications channel between companies and their customers. A combination of monitoring, analysis and engagement functions underpins the “Listen – Understand – Engage” methodology which lies at COSMIC’s core. It enables companies to gain an overview of where conversations are taking place, identify opinion leaders and trends, facilitate communications with “social customers” as well as measuring the reach and effectiveness of their social efforts.

By virtue of being completely integrated within the operative CRM application, COSMIC can trigger pre-defined CRM processes (for example a complaint management process) based on discrete “social” events (for example when a customer complains about your product or service on twitter). This pattern can be applied to a wide range of CRM processes across marketing, sales and customer service functions.