There is a trend that is rapidly growing in the commercial sector. Companies of all sizes are gravitating toward cloud computing, increasing their investments in this platform according to the opportunities afforded in their respective industries. At the same time, companies area also stepping up their focus on customer relationship management (CRM) to preserve their investments in their current customer base and expand their prospective opportunities.
The merging of these two platforms, cloud computing and CRM, has resulted in the emergence of
CRM cloud computing. In a recent success story featured in this Network World (News - Alert)
piece, the focus was on moving a hospice from a milk crate CRM operation to an innovative platform that could benefit the organization and its clients.
David Lafferty joined Tidewell Hospice as the first CIO for the company. He noticed that liaisons were going from account to account with their own binders, spreadsheets and rolodexes. The typical scenario was in place with offline, manual, decentralized and zero-visibility functionality. There was a
definite need for CRM cloud computing.
Today, Tidewell has one of the most sophisticated CRM implementations within the hospice industry. The company relies on Salesforce.com’s SaaS (News
- Alert)-based CRM, which is integrated with its internal electronic medical record (EMR) system. While the organization’s needs were much like that of other companies in other industries, they are also focused on identifying relationship opportunities and building on those opportunities to turn them into clients.
The CRM cloud computing
platform implemented covers roughly 70 users per day and cost the organization roughly a third of the cost of some of the typical on-premise and CRM cloud computing solutions for which they received quotes. In going with the Salesforce.com (News
- Alert) solution, the organization gets beneficial pricing for being a nonprofit.
There was the HIPPA challenge in selecting its CRM cloud computing
solution as some within the organization were worried about sending that information outside of the firewall. In the past, all data the organization cared about was in one system and housed in one building. It was very easy for IT and compliance teams to own, manage and protect that data. When talk first emerged around CRM cloud computing, security was the primary concern.
Salesforce.com provided the education the organization needed to know that the data they capture and manage would be safe and protected according to HIPPA rules. At the same time, the CRM cloud computing platform would provide capability, flexibility and scalability beyond any platform leveraged in the past. The result was a powerful solution that could deliver measurable benefits throughout the organization.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Juliana Kenny