Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 allows businesses to respond to the growing challenges in the modern business environment by bringing client and prospect information into a central repository, organizing the information and allowing users throughout the business to access the data when they need it. Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 delivers the ability to manage the customer relationship throughout the entire sales cycle from initial inquiry in response to a marketing or sales campaign, through to pre-sales meetings, the actual sale and post sale issues such as delivery and repeat ordering.

Microsoft Dynamics software empowers every decision maker in your business to satisfy customer demands by providing the most up-to-date and accurate client information they need when they need it and ensure that the history of the relationship is encapsulated for all to share. Decision makers in this context need not necessarily be management but a customer service representative with a customer on the telephone asking about an order or information on your other products. All staff in contact with prospects and customers will be able to see at a glance what is happening with a particular account and in customer relations, knowledge is power. Customer relationship software provides everyone in your business with the ability to demonstrate an outstanding level of customer service not possible by traditional reporting methods.

The ability to integrate a customer relationship software solution with existing applications already employed by your business allows for the transfer of information between your word processor and spreadsheet applications and the CRM. Microsoft CRM software has been specifically designed with Microsoft Outlook and Office in mind, and allows a seamless user experience. Mobile workers reliant upon email are able to access Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 via their Outlook client, while marketing and sales campaigns can use data imported from the Dynamics Suite directly into Microsoft Word and Excel applications for marketing campaigns and mail shots.

If your business has several office and site locations, it is still possible to implement a customer relationship software solution across the whole company. Microsoft Dynamics v3.0 is well adapted to be delivered to remote locations via Microsoft Terminal Services, Citrix and other “thin client” solutions. An example is where a business has a central warehousing facility in Detroit with sales offices in New York, San Francisco and Chicago and they all are able to utilise the customer relationship software solution almost in real-time.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM v3.0 benefits your business by saving time and costs, minimizing non-productive activity while maximizing sales revenue by ensuring that sales leads are followed up and do not get lost or “fall between the cracks”, while customer retention is improved by enhancing customer relations and service.

About the Author

Syed Ali, is the lead CRM consultant for a Toronto based company. His company offers, Microsoft CRM Software Syed can be reached at Tel : (905) 815- 1995 ext 22, email :asyed@cqsolutions.com

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One of the driving forces in the expansion of Call and Contact Centers worldwide is the burgeoning CRM (Customer Relationship Management) industry and its use in today’s technology-enabled corporate environments. CRM is a catch-all term that is most commonly used to describe software and related technologies that manage customer-facing business functions (most notably Sales, Customer Service, Marketing, and Support) and their related business processes and data.

The term CRM first emerged in the mid-1990s, created with the intent of describing how Sales, Marketing and Customer Service technologies needed to work not just within each department but also integrated together. Prior to the advent of CRM, some companies deployed Sales Force Automation (SFA) applications to automate the sales process and track prospect data, but that data did not usually leave the sales department. Therefore when customers called in with a problem or service need, the Customer Service department would be unaware of interactions with the Sales team. This lead to customers’ perceptions that the company was uncaring, incompetent or uncoordinated. This would often result in a frustrated customer departing for the competition.

Early customer-facing applications, SFA, telemarketing, marketing campaign management, and help desk served their individual purposes, but were unable to provide the integration that allowed companies to serve their customers with a “single face.”

CRM is neither a simple nor risk-free proposition, but not implementing CRM is also not an option. Markets continue to get more and more competitive, and the margin between success and failure grow narrow. Companies that are able to better manage customer data and customer-facing processes have a clear advantage over their competitors.

When implemented and utilized to its full potential, CRM allows companies to increase both their revenues and profits while lowering the cost of marketing, selling to and servicing their customers. The payoff is clear – by better aligning business processes and managing customer data across all customer-facing functions, companies can build successful, profitable and long-term customer relationships.

A CRM strategy is about much more than merely selecting the right technology – rather it is a business strategy that may very well necessitate that you completely reinvent how companies do business. Despite these challenges, many companies including many Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) have seen tremendous success with CRM.

Getting CRM right is about striking balance between tactically solving problems within specific areas and managing customer-facing processes and data across them. For CRM to be successful at both strategic and technological levels, it must be integrated.

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Companies in the market for CRM solutions actually are in need of better managing relationships with their customers, and most are looking at CRM applications as the answer. I am not about to suggest that any of the well designed and reliable IT solutions are not a significant piece of the puzzle. I will say that alone, they are not ‘the answer’. Three significant misconceptions continue to impede the successful implementation of CRM systems or upgrades. The first myth is that CRM is a software solution, secondly that CRM is a tactic and lastly that satisfied customers are loyal customers. The truth is that CRM is a people driven – not a software solution, CRM is a strategy not a tactic, and satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal.

Busting the myths – the 5 W’s of Customer Relations.

Myth #1. CRM is a Software Solution. Who – If you spend $25,000 on the installation and implementation of a CRM system, and six months down the road you have no increase in the number of customers regularly repeating business with you, Who is accountable? What – If your employees do not ‘buy in’ to the new system, failing to input or update customer information correctly, What results will your $25,000 investment produce? Why – Have you purchased and introduced this new software? If your answer is in any way similar to the following statement, you are guaranteeing failure: Our employees never seem to have the time, or just don’t consistently follow up with our customers. Where – Are you measuring and monitoring the results produced by your CRM software at the end of the process? If you are, how do you know the quality of the data initially input by front line staff? When – Time, a commodity always in demand, always in short supply. Two thoughts on time: If one of the reasons you made this investment was due to the fact that your employees didn’t follow up with your customers, what makes you think they’ll now have or take the time to accurately update records in the system? And have you made provisions for one or more people to have the extra time needed to monitor and review the output of the system for errors, duplications or unique circumstances?

Having put all that out on the table, I’m sure (well, actually I’m hoping) that I’ve left you with more questions. “If this great new IT solution is not the whole answer, what is?”, “I’ve already made the investment, how do I ensure its success?”, “We’ve trained and offered incentives to our employees, they claim to be following proceedures, but still our numbers haven’t gone up. What do we do now?” … The possibilities here are limitless!

From my perspective, I say GOOD! It means I’ve succeeded in reaching my goal for today. To provide food for thought, to provide incentive for you to question and examine what you are doing today and what results you are getting is a tremendous step towards a solution. Success never comes by way of quick fixes or trendy technology. You will arrive at success only once you have honestly assessed the gap and determined where you are today. If you also have a clear view of where you want to go tomorrow, we can begin to size up that gap and decide how to bridge it.

How to do that begins with the discussion of the next myth: CRM is a tactic. My next post will bust that myth in brief as we’ve done here with the first.

Over the course of this series we will be taking an honest look at where many businesses are today – The real deal, I don’t care too much for ‘political correctness’ or ‘beating around the bush’. Some may not like my approach, but those that follow me through, those that suffer the unease of examining and questioning your ‘comfort zone’ will find themselves ahead of the game and significantly improving their success.

Until next time, I implore you to change your viewpoint, get down on the ground, climb a ladder, anything to look at your business, your employees, your customers and your processes from a different perspective. I also encourage you to read. If you haven’t looked at a book on customer service since your college days, do it now. Some of my favourites are: “The Butterfly Customer: Capturing the Loyalty of Today’s Elusive Consumer”, “Customer Tells : Deliver World Class Customer Service Using Championship Poker Strategies” and “Are You Being Served Yet?: Customer Service Evolution”.

Thanks for reading. I wish you all success at learning something new today.

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1 quick access and transfer of information;
2. lack of space and time barriers;
3. ease of comparison between various objects, events, or organizations;
4. interactivity and flexibility.

Also, it has to be taken into consideration that in most cases, the e-service represents a one-to-one experience (company-customer).

In this specific environment, the customer will therefore be able to access the company’s website from any place in the world (as long as it has a working Internet connection), to compare the company’s offer and to interact with the organization on a one-to-one basis. On the other hand, the company is capable of attracting and developing relationships with customers located anywhere in the world, to make an ongoing competitors’ analysis, and to personalize its interaction with the customer.
Balancing the two sides of the experience (company/customer), an online service provider will have to define and select its target customers (focus) to analyze the specific competition for that particular market segment (competitive analysis), and to design its long-term interaction with the customer in order to achieve sustained customer satisfaction (strategic planning and implementation).
eCRM can be therefore defined as an interactive, content-centered, and Internet-based customer process, driven by the customer and integrated with related organizational customer support processes and technologies, with the goal of strengthening the customer-service provider relationship.
The Internet empowers the customer. The Internet user has the opportunity to switch the suppliers with several mouse clicks, to compare price and products on a worldwide basis, and to select without external pressure the best available offer. The winning combination of low-price/high-quality product does not work properly on the Internet because the same offer may be available to hundreds of other online retailers. The only possibility to increase the competitive advantage of online retailing is to create not only product-related satisfaction, but also customer-firm relationship satisfaction.
The implementation of customer relationship management (CRM) represents the key to increasing customer loyalty in the digital environment.
Besides the necessity of CRM systems in online businesses, the Internet also offers the possibility of implementing effective customer management operations through the use of complex IT applications (e.g., database software, customer management applications).

Consequently, the selection of CRM applications needs to be strategic and based on relevant criteria for implementation to stand a chance of success. These criteria will include functionality, company strategy, legacy back office systems, and application architecture. Current classification of CRM applications identifies three groupings:

1. Operational CRM products – for improving customer service, online marketing, automating sales force, etc.
2. Analytical CRM products – for building data warehouses, improving relationships, analyzing data, etc.
3. Collaborative CRM products – for building online communities, developing business-to-business customer exchanges, personalizing services, etc.

The implementation of an efficient CRM strategy requires the introduction of a customer-focused organizational culture Customer-centric organizations are defined as being very committed to raising customer satisfaction levels, using customer data to increase sales, improving customer data quality, gaining a deeper knowledge of customers, and implementing customer-management systems The key operations for building an effective CRM strategy include:

• identifying unique characteristics of each customer within the targeted customer segments
• modeling the current and the potential value of each customer
• creating proactive strategies and operational plans, or business rules that will support the desired experience for the customer, starting with the highest value customers
• redesigning the organization, processes, technology
• reward system to implement the relationship strategies.

DJ note: Article Source

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Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategic concept enabling companies to systematically build up and extend the knowledge of their customers, thus empowering companies to actively conduct, ie, manage, the business relationships with their customers. CRM can be understood as a revolving process during which companies interact with their customers, thereby generating, aggregating, and analyzing customer data obtained from all channels, and employing the results for service and marketing activities.

Companies may pursue several goals when employing CRM to manage their customer relationships. An economic goal which companies seek to achieve by the use of CRM is to increase profitability by concentrating on the economically valuable customers, thus increasing revenue (“share of wallet”) from them, while possibly “de-marketing” and discontinuing the business relationship with non-profitable customers. Strategic considerations represent another motivation for companies to employ CRM: By providing customized products and services to them, companies can increase their customer satisfaction, which is likely to lead to higher customer loyalty and longer customer retention. This, in turn, makes it less probable that their customers will defect to other companies (i.e., it lowers the churn rate).
Electronic commerce customer relationship management or ECCRM strongly relies on Internet or Web-based interaction of companies with their customers, yet also includes customer data obtained through the other channels. As the term suggests, ECCRM is a key element of CRM by specifically aiming at supporting electronic commerce, which we understand as the activities related to initiating, negotiating, and executing business transactions online. Since the beginning of the commercial use of the Web, ECCRM has received increasing attention from both practitioners and researchers.

In order to enable the revolving (EC)CRM process, a number of instruments must be implemented. They comprise a technical infrastructure as a base, as well as a number of business processes conducted on top. The instruments can be grouped into the following categories, each representing a step in the revolving process:

1. Data Collection. To generate customer information, customer data should first be collected across all available channels. In electronic commerce, these are typically a company’s website, but also email, interaction with the (Web) call center, and the offline channels. Customer data can be collected either actively, i.e., with the knowledge of the customers, e.g., through interactive questionnaires on the Web, or passively, i.e., without the knowledge of the customers, e.g., through clickstream analyses or by otherwise logging customers’ surfing behavior while on the company’s website. Correspondingly, the type of the data collected may range from personal information, preferences, or purchase histories, to rather intimate behavioral data which the customers themselves might even be unconscious of.
2. Data Aggregation. In this step, customer data is first pooled from all sources (channels) and then “distilled” (i.e., concentrated) to customer information. Depending on the industry and customer type, a considerable amount of business intelligence is necessary in order to recognize certain patterns within the customer information, i.e., typical profiles. While collecting all kinds of customer data may be relatively simple, condensing it and making proper sense of it, i.e., as the final consequence, drawing the right conclusion with respect to the profitability of a customer, is a lot more difficult. Over the Internet and World Wide Web, most competitors in a market (segment) may have access to the same customer base, especially as search and switching costs tend to be very low. Therefore it is the quality of customer information and its evaluation with which companies can secure their competitive advantage.
3. Customer Interaction. With this step, one cycle of the revolving ECCRM process is closed. Companies can react to their customers based on the customer information they have. They can provide positive feedback to, i.e., actively market to their customers, thus intensifying the revolving ECCRM process, or they can provide negative feedback to their customers, i.e., de-market and terminate the business relationship with them.

The central message is that a skill set based on accumulating and exploiting customer knowledge, which we term companies’ ECCRM-capability, is a key success factor in electronic commerce. Yet for the time being, it must be left up to every company to decide how they can attain a sufficient level of ECCRM-capability. While some companies may have already built up their ECCRM-capability through their regular business processes, others might require the implementation of an ECCRM system. Original Article Source

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Increase in the demand of customer relationship management (CRM) has lead to the popularity of CRM solutions providers. CRM solutions providers are broadly classified into two – in-house CRM solutions providers and hosted CRM solutions providers.

In-house CRM solutions providers are also known as customized CRM solutions providers and on-demand solutions providers. Generally, in-house CRM solutions providers give solutions to meet the specific needs of a company or a customer. They give business solutions to all types and sizes of companies. Based on the size of the company or organization, in-house CRM solutions providers usually take three to twelve months for the complete implementation of their program. In-house CRM solutions providers have many added advantages when compared with hosted solutions providers. In-house CRM solutions providers generally have an intimate knowledge of the legacy systems in the organization. Thus, their programs are easy to install and maintain. Usually, in-house CRM solutions providers give solutions for sales, marketing, and other services. In-house CRM solutions providers are more costly, when compared with hosted CRM solutions providers. For example, an in-house CRM solutions provider will charge around $2,000 to $3,500 for a business service.

Hosted CRM solutions providers are better known as outsourced CRM solutions providers. This type of CRM solution providers simplifies the entire management process, and thus reduces the risk and increases the value of the businesses. Hosted CRM solutions providers have solutions for sales, marketing, and other major services.

Editor’s Note: See ServiceCycle CRM for an example of hosted crm

When compared with in-house CRM solutions providers, hosted CRM solutions providers are more cost-effective. Generally, hosted CRM solutions providers will cost around $70 per month for a medium size business organization. Therefore, it is widely used by small and medium-sized business organizations.

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There are two broad strategic activities involved in increasing our brands’ market share. We have to keep getting more revenues. And we have to avoid losing revenues we are already getting.

We will never grow our market share if we don’t keep in-creasing our revenues. We will also never grow our market share if we keep losing more revenues than we are getting.

Each of these two strategic activities involves two functions:

There are two broad ways to keep getting more revenues:
1. We have to convert more prospects into customers.
2. We have to get our existing customers to use more of our products or services.

And there are two broad ways to avoid losing revenues we are already getting:
3. We have to avoid disappointing customers’ experience of our products or services.
4. We have to avoid disappointing customers in all the other the experiences they might associate with our brand.

Of the four strategic functions, the first, that of converting more prospects into customers, is, by far, more difficult than the other three.

This is because this function involves overcoming two major barriers:
a) prospects have little or no interest in or any relation-ship with our brand;
b) prospects are already engaged in another activity that we will have to discontinue, typically that of using our competitor’s product or services.

This is the function that focuses on our prospects, the people who possess the money that is not yet being transmuted into our revenues, and are therefore the most important target toward increasing the market share of our brand.

Prospects have to made to notice our brand, they have to be made to get interested in our brand, they have to be made to desire our brand, and they have to be made to prefer our brand over its competitors, and ultimately, of course, they have to be made to purchase our brand, which is when their money becomes our revenues, and when prospects become our customers.

The remaining three strategic functions, that of increasing customers’ usage, and avoiding disappointing them either with our products/services or in any other way, are, relatively, significantly easier. This is because all three of them involve dealing with people who, as existing customers, are already in a relationship with us. As such, these three strategic functions involve a degree of receptivity toward us from the people we are addressing. Indeed, with today’s interactive media, it has become easier for us to know them individually by name, know where they live, how to reach them, and be familiar with their demographics of gender, age, education, lifestyle, and other habits; and their psycho-graphics of values, interests and other preferences.

Coming back to the first strategic function, that of converting prospects into customers, we have literally to transform their existing disinterest toward our brand into a relationship. This toughest business challenge involves, above all, the WHAT of branding, and the HOW of MarComm, advertising, sales promotions, merchandising, pricing, distribution, packaging and other marketing and communications media and activities.

Branding is the most important of these because it is the conceptual essence of the entire business building effort. Branding comprises the cluster of concepts and signals that have the challenge of overcoming the greatest barriers between us and the prospect – those of their disinterest and pre-existing preferences and habits. The disciplines and media of sales, advertising, sales promotions, distribution, pricing, merchandising and packaging, etc. then have to deliver this brand communications essence to the prospect so that it can break through the barriers of disinterest and prior practice.

CRM, or customer relationship management should cover all the HOWs involved in maintaining and strengthening the relationship with the customer, once branding has broken through and established the relationship.

In this, CRM must remain consistent with the brand communications essence, which lives on in the customer as a cluster of expectations and signals, which is the de facto the brand. Just as the above mentioned sales, marketing and communications functions must deliver the brand through media and locations, CRM must deliver, and stay true to the brand essence through all its human and other experiential interactions with the customer.

So every element of the functioning relationship with the customer, the ease of opening the package, the ease of use of the product, the performance of the product, the disposal of the packaging, the messages received by the customer, the experiences of the customer with customer service staff, with billing staff, with credit control staff, with collections staff, with vehicles bearing our brand’s logo, all must not only avoid negative residue, but also regard themselves as brand communications as well, and deliver all these activity-media in ways that are consistent with the brand.

It must be noted that CRM can also contribute indirectly to increasing revenues and market share as well. This can be accomplished by fulfilling the brand essence vis a vis the customer so thoroughly via the latter’s experiences, that customers are delighted enough to make the effort to recommend it to other people who also happen to be prospects.

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Further, because NetSuite integrates customer transactions native to a company’s CRM product, customer service representatives are aided by historic transaction and upsell opportunities. “This functionality encourages the opportunity to support and grow sales through enhanced customer service capabilities,” notes Emaus.

While it’s inevitable that customer complaints will arise, with an integrated CRM system, those complaints won’t fall through the cracks. “NetSuite has a closed-loop process that ensures that problems will be effectively tracked and resolved,” says Emaus. “This is light years ahead of manual tracking, and moreover, NetSuite even allows customers to follow the resolution process through a self-service portal.”

For many companies, customer service begins with the prospecting phase of sales. NetSuite recognizes this, and has integrated several functions to more quickly turn website visitors into customers. By giving businesses the capability to customize their website’s search function and to receive reports on frequent searches and results returned, company owners can keep their fingers on the pulse of their customers and potential customers.

Moreover, with companies increasingly relying on paid search keyword campaigns to market their products and services, it’s important for businesses to know which keyword campaigns are generating both leads and revenue. “NetSuite recognizes that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more sales, and that tracking the effectiveness of keyword campaigns is crucial to the bottom line,” says Emaus.

Emaus concludes, “Regardless of the size of an enterprise, fully integrated customer service management is critical to both growth and profitability. NetSuite ensures that CRM is both streamlined and effective.”

About the Author

Kris Nickerson is the Editor-in-Chief of Press Direct International (http://www.pressdirectinternational.org), a global information website that provides reliable information tailored to professionals in financial, media, and corporate markets. His thorough knowledge of industries ranging from health care and travel to real estate and financial investing enables him to quickly grasp the nuances of emerging markets and technologies.

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In the last several years, however, newer software systems and advanced tracking features have vastly improved CRM capabilities and the real promise of CRM is becoming a reality. As the price of newer, more customizable Internet solutions have hit the marketplace; competition has driven the prices down so that even relatively small businesses are reaping the benefits of some custom CRM programs.

In the beginning…

The 1980’s saw the emergence of database marketing, which was simply a catch phrase to define the practice of setting up customer service groups to speak individually to all of a company’s customers.

In the case of larger, key clients it was a valuable tool for keeping the lines of communication open and tailoring service to the clients needs. In the case of smaller clients, however, it tended to provide repetitive, survey-like information that cluttered databases and didn’t provide much insight. As companies began tracking database information, they realized that the bare bones were all that was needed in most cases: what they buy regularly, what they spend, what they do.

Advances in the 1990’s

In the 1990’s companies began to improve on Customer Relationship Management by making it more of a two-way street. Instead of simply gathering data for their own use, they began giving back to their customers not only in terms of the obvious goal of improved customer service, but in incentives, gifts and other perks for customer loyalty.

This was the beginning of the now familiar frequent flyer programs, bonus points on credit cards and a host of other resources that are based on CRM tracking of customer activity and spending patterns. CRM was now being used as a way to increase sales passively as well as through active improvement of customer service.

True CRM comes of age

Real Customer Relationship Management as it’s thought of today really began in earnest in the early years of this century. As software companies began releasing newer, more advanced solutions that were customizable across industries, it became feasible to really use the information in a dynamic way.

Instead of feeding information into a static database for future reference, CRM became a way to continuously update understanding of customer needs and behavior. Branching of information, sub-folders, and custom tailored features enabled companies to break down information into smaller subsets so that they could evaluate not only concrete statistics, but information on the motivation and reactions of customers.

The Internet provided a huge boon to the development of these huge databases by enabling offsite information storage. Where before companies had difficulty supporting the enormous amounts of information, the Internet provided new possibilities and CRM took off as providers began moving toward Internet solutions.

With the increased fluidity of these programs came a less rigid relationship between sales, customer service and marketing. CRM enabled the development of new strategies for more cooperative work between these different divisions through shared information and understanding, leading to increased customer satisfaction from order to end product.

Today, CRM is still utilized most frequently by companies that rely heavily on two distinct features: customer service or technology. The three sectors of business that rely most heavily on CRM — and use it to great advantage — are financial services, a variety of high tech corporations and the telecommunications industry.

The financial services industry in particular tracks the level of client satisfaction and what customers are looking for in terms of changes and personalized features. They also track changes in investment habits and spending patterns as the economy shifts. Software specific to the industry can give financial service providers truly impressive feedback in these areas.

Who’s in the CRM game?

About 50% of the CRM market is currently divided between five major players in the industry: PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and relative newcomer Telemation, based on Linux and developed by an old standard, Database Solutions, Inc.

The other half of the market falls to a variety of other players, although Microsoft’s new emergence in the CRM market may cause a shift soon. Whether Microsoft can capture a share of the market remains to be seen. However, their brand-name familiarity may give them an edge with small businesses considering a first-time CRM package.

PeopleSoft was founded in the mid-1980’s by Ken Morris and Dave Duffield as a client-server based human resources application. In 1998, PeopleSoft had evolved into a purely Internet based system, PeopleSoft 8. There’s no client software to maintain and it supports over 150 applications. PeopleSoft 8 is the brainchild of over 2,000 dedicated developers and $500 million in research and development.

PeopleSoft branched out from their original human resources platform in the 1990’s and now supports everything from customer service to supply chain management. Its user-friendly system required minimal training is relatively inexpensive to deploy. .

One of PeopleSoft’s major contributions to CRM was their detailed analytic program that identifies and ranks the importance of customers based on numerous criteria, including amount of purchase, cost of supplying them, and frequency of service.

Oracle built a solid base of high-end customers in the late 1980’s, then burst into national attention around 1990 when, under Tom Siebel, the company aggressively marketed a small-to-medium business CRM solution. Unfortunately they couldn’t follow up themselves on the incredible sales they garnered and ran into a few years of real problems.

Oracle landed on its feet after a restructuring and their own refocusing on customer needs and by the mid-1990’s the company was once again a leader in CRM technologies. They continue to be one of the leaders in the enterprise marketplace with the Oracle Customer Data Management System.

Telemation’s CRM solution is flexible and user-friendly, with a toolkit that makes changing features and settings relatively easy. The system also provides a quick learning environment that newcomers will appreciate. Its uniqueness lies in that, although compatible with Windows, it was developed as a Linux program. Will Linux be the wave of the future? We don’t know, but if it is, Telemation’s ahead of the game.

The last few years…

In 2002, Oracle released their Global CRM in 90 Days package that promised quick implementation of CRM throughout company offices. Offered with the package was a set fee service for set-up and training for core business needs. .

Also in 2002 (a stellar year for CRM), SAP America’s mySAP began using a “middleware” hub that was capable of connecting SAP systems to externals and front and back office systems for a unified operation that links partners, employees, process and technologies in a closed-loop function.

Siebel consistently based its business primarily on enterprise size businesses willing to invest millions in CRM systems, which worked for them to the tune of $2.1 billion in 2001. However, in 2002 and 2003 revenues slipped as several smaller CRM firms joined the fray as ASP’s (Application Service Providers). These companies, including UpShot, NetSuite and SalesNet, offered businesses CRM-style tracking and data management without the high cost of traditional CRM start-up.

In October of 2003, Siebel launched CRM OnDemand in collaboration with IBM. Their entry into the hosted, monthly CRM solution niche hit the marketplace with gale force. To some of the monthly ASP’s it was a call to arms, to others it was a sign of Siebel’s increasing confusion over brand identity and increasing loss of market share. In a stroke of genius, Siebel acquired UpShot a few months later to get them started and smooth their transition into the ASP market. It was a successful move.

With Microsoft now in the game, it’s too soon to tell what the results will be, but it seems likely that they may get some share of small businesses that tend to buy based on familiarity and usability. ASP’s will continue to grow in popularity as well, especially with mid-sized businesses, so companies like NetSuite, SalesNet and Siebel’s OnDemand will thrive. CRM on the web has come of age!

This article on the “The History of CRM” reprinted with permission.
Copyright © 2004-2005 Evaluseek Publishing.

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