Gallimaufry

By Erik Lounsbury
Editor, CUSTOMER INTER@CTION Solutions

One might say that at least once a year my wife and I become inveterate jigsaw puzzlers. Many Thanksgivings we have gathered with our friends at various East Coast beaches (the Outer Banks are particularly nice and empty at Thanksgiving), opened up a new puzzle and spent hours at a time leaning over the dinning room table, sorting the pieces and then fitting them together, one at a time, ending up with puzzle backs (the hunched-over posture and resulting backache that comes from this activity) and, finally, the completed picture.

Similar to doing jigsaw puzzles or to the film Picking Up The Pieces (in which the character played by Woody Allen murders his wife, cuts her up into bits, but loses a few of the pieces on the way to burying her, one of which, her hand, seems to provide magical powers and good fortune on those who come in contact with it -- in this case, an entire town), in striving to create a successful CRM program, we spend many hours searching for the missing pieces, trying to find the panacea, the piece that will make our CRM dreams come true and relieve us of our headaches, puzzle backs and whatever else ails us.

Start With A Plan
Looking to help businesses put the CRM pieces together, IBM Global Services (www.ibm.com/solutions) has launched its CRM Vision Builder program, which, according to Ed Hutt, IBM Siebel Practice Executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, IBM developed because they heard a growing demand from the market to be more certain about CRM. Hutt said that what they heard from businesses, their underlying theme, was the uncertainty that CRM programs would generate returns. "The Vision Builder program is designed to give certainty to implementation -- show clients the financial case for a CRM program, how the system would work, how their program could work, so they can walk away saying, 'I know how this would work, what the needs would be and what the returns would be,'" said Hutt. "In 1998 and 1999 there were a lot of point solutions," Hutt continued, "and now companies are moving toward total CRM implementations to rationalize the point installations."

The service is configured to provide preliminary planning as well as analysis of CRM systems already in place. It offers an in-depth customer workshop that defines the parameters of a proposed CRM program, develops an understanding of the financial and cultural impact on an organization, and helps build the processes needed for successful transformation. IBM has developed a number of tools for this purpose, including IBM's Industry Based Templates for Siebel, a suite of sophisticated metrics, and IBM's CRM Route Map.

IBM's Value Optimiser for Siebel eBusiness Applications, part of the IBM Vision Builder suite of services, provides financial and analytical tools to better understand and define the unexplored business and profit potential as yet untapped within installed CRM projects.

Transforming Information Into Knowledge
While putting together the pieces of CRM software and planning is of extreme importance, so too, is understanding the information you have collected and knowing how and when to act upon it: the ability to turn information into knowledge. Working at providing its customers with that capability is Business Objects (www.businessobjects.com), a provider of knowledge management software and services. Rani Goel, the director of worldwide telecom marketing at Business Objects, said that the business intelligence provided by Business Objects gives in-house users and customers access into various data depositories. She said that companies use Business Objects offerings to differentiate themselves from other providers, to enhance revenue by understanding their customers better and offering them appropriately targeted offers, to increase operational revenue and customer loyalty, and to introduce new product to market more quickly.

The Business Objects solution is a suite of integrated enterprise analytic applications, BusinessObjects Analytics, which combines both packaged best-practice applications and analytic technologies designed to span the entire enterprise and provide a single view of the enterprise. The suite's applications include Customer Intelligence, Application Foundation, Product and Service Intelligence, Supply Chain Intelligence and Operations Intelligence. To provide access to the enterprise, customers, partners and suppliers, Business Object's provides BusinessObjects, a business intelligence tool that gives users the ability to access, analyze and share information stored in multiple data sources within and beyond the enterprise. WebIntelligence allows users to access, analyze, and share strategic data over Intranets to improve internal corporate decision making, and over Extranets for the benefit of customers, partners and suppliers. Users can quickly create queries, format results, and share reports. BusinessObjects InfoView Mobile allows a company's mobile workforce on-demand access to corporate business intelligence. InfoView Mobile provides support for all Internet-enabled mobile devices, including mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Full-length/size business intelligence reports can also be downloaded to PDA devices for offline drill-down analysis.

Solving The Application Spaghetti Problem
Because proper CRM involves the entire enterprise, putting together the pieces of the many applications used by an enterprise (enterprise application integration) can be an uglier scene (not to mention much more costly and one that has to be revisited more often) than the one of John Lennon shoveling spaghetti onto the plate of Auntie Jessie in the film, Magical Mystery Tour.

According to Dale Skeen, co-founder and CTO of Vitria (www.vitria.com), Vitria has taken a model approach to EAI with its new line, the Vitria Collaborative Application for Collaborative Information Model Synchronization (VCA for CIM Synchronization), which provides for integration through common information models rather than traditional hard coding. Vitria Colllaborative Applications facilitate real-time execution of complex business processes by allowing parties and applications to work collaboratively. Skeen said VCA for CIM Synchronization has the ability to coordinate multiple applications, providing connectors and messaging for out-of-the-box synchronization for enterprise applications such as Siebel, SAP, PeopleSoft and Oracle, and provide initial cost savings of around 30 percent and up to 60 percent over the lifetime of the software.

VCA for CIM Synchronization's common architecture is built on the foundation of Vitria BusinessWare, which allows multiple applications to simultaneously interoperate with services and object definitions that are extensible, customizable and upgradeable.

Get 'em While They're Hot
A piece of CRM I have yet to touch on is sales and lead acquisition, always a difficult task, especially on the Web. NewChannel (www.newchannel.com) has recently come out with version 4.0 of its hosted NewChannel Web sales and lead acquisition solution that is designed to put a sales representative in contact with a potential Web customer when it is most advantageous for making a sale.

Alan Weisleder, NewChannel's president and CEO, updated me on some of the new features in version 4.0. Weisleder pointed out that the majority of visitors aren't ready to buy when they visit a Web site, so NewChannel allows agents to engage customers while they are on the site. While potential customers are browsing a NewChannel user's Web site, the Qualification Engine analyzes the Web site visitors' behavior in real time, and selects those who are behaving most like serious prospects. The Invitation Engine automatically sends invitations on behalf of agents, inviting qualified Web visitors to a real-time, online sales consultation. The Intelligent Auto-Invitation Engine, which Weisleder said is similar to an autodialer in that it can be set to maintain a capacity of concurrent engagements for an agent as well as route visitors to agents by product expertise. The NewChannel Rep Multi-Engagement View allows agents to effectively manage multiple interactions at once by providing an integrated view of each visitor with whom the agent is engaged. Through integration with e-mail, NewChannel 4.0 enables companies to establish 'virtual landing pages' tied directly to marketing and sales campaigns. When the recipient clicks-through from the e-mail to the virtual landing page, an agent is automatically notified that they have come to the site and is aware of which e-mail campaign they received. NewChannel 4.0 also provides a variety of opt-in invitations, which are based on what a customer has already seen on the Web site or in an e-mail.

Weisleder said NewChannel's engagement strategy is more cost-effective than outbound telesales (0.4 sales per hour average versus 1.4 sales per hour with NewChannel) and it is often more effective than inbound telesales as agents do not need to educate the customers on the products as the customers are already investigating them on the Web site.

So, like a jigsaw puzzle, CRM has many pieces that need to be fitted together to form a complete picture of your company and your customers. These products and services can help you get closer to that elusive picture, the satisfied customer.

The author may be contacted at elounsbury@tmcnet.com.