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HOME by: Christian
Sarkar A survey of the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to help you get closer to your customers. Related
articles: As businesses shift their focus from reducing costs to generating value, customer relationship strategies will play an increasingly important role in the future. As a result, the technology market for customer relationship management (CRM) solutions is booming. "The customer relationship technology market that brought in $788.5 million in 1997 will stand at $4.5 billion by 2002," says Judy Hodges, cross-industry applications research manager at International Data Corporation (IDC). "That's a compound annual growth rate of 41.9 percent." Categories The exploding CRM market covers the entire range of front-office activities: marketing, sales and customer service. While the major enterprise resource planning (ERP) players are carving out portions of the market, small, specialized CRM companies are creating alliances or simply offering integration capabilities with enterprise back-office applications. The CRM marketspace is also witnessing the birth of myriad companies specializing in e-commerce and personalization. For the sake of simplicity, tools covered here will be categorized as follows:
The Candidates Three comprehensive enterprise relationship management candidates stand out: Baan, ONYX and Siebel. Other products described here are from specialty vendors or up-and-coming companies. CRM solutions are not the easiest to implement - and getting your marketing and sales representatives on board may require behavioral as well as technical modifications. And there's always the option to build your own. Before you decide which route to take, it's worth your while to look at these tools closely. Some of the largest companies in the world use these products to attract and retain profitable customers. The overall industry leader is Siebel Systems, Inc., which bolstered its market position earlier this year when it merged with Scopus, a world-class call center software company. Three key products include: Siebel Marketing Enterprise, a prepackaged marketing automation solution; Siebel Sales Enterprise, an integrated and automated contact and activity management and tracking system; and Siebel Service Enterprise, which supports service requests and account management and profiling. Siebel 99, a new release, delivers extensive functionality to both end users and corporate IT based on a "configure once, deploy everywhere" model. This is the model for the future - deployed solutions for mobile users on laptops and handheld devices, connected call center users on desktops and intermittently connected users over the Internet. Baan Configuration, by Baan, is an integrated suite that enables you to configure complex product and service offerings, generate quotations and proposals, browse an electronic catalog and build products to order. BaanSales manages business opportunities, account information and multiple sales channels. BaanEncylopedia is an online marketing encyclopedia. BaanCallCenter features components for customer service and support via phone, e-mail, fax and the Web. BaanService automates key customer service functions and BaanCatalog provides electronic catalog functionality. Customer Center by ONYX manages all enterprise-wide customer interactions from a single application interface. It combines functions for marketing, sales, customer service, technical support and quality assurance. With its unique customer-centric design, ONYX Customer Center provides a "customer information dashboard" containing all enterprise-wide customer data that tells employees what they are required to sell and which customers they are required to serve. Clarify's FrontOffice 98 Product Suite consists of five separate solution areas, each of which focuses on a different aspect of customer relationships. Customer Service Solution helps companies build a knowledge base of key customer information. Field Service Solution coordinates processes and services between the main office and field service personnel. Help Desk Solution streamlines and improves help desk functions. Integrated Call Center Solution routes incoming calls to the appropriate personnel based on the caller's service history. Sales & Marketing Solution automates sales and marketing processes in all departments of an organization. DirectSell is LikeMinds' solution for traditional catalogers, direct marketers and retailers. It predicts (in real time) the products a customer is likely to purchase, based on customer profiles and purchase history stored in databases or yielded from the current transaction. WebSell predicts the products a customer is likely to purchase, based on profiles and purchase history obtained from a customer's online interactions, preferences and transaction history. Pivotal Relationship 98 offers a suite of CRM software options. Sales Relationship allows inside and field sales professionals to efficiently capture and track prospects, manage sales opportunities through a customizable sales cycle, forecast sales, align territories, report performance and share information with other colleagues. Marketing Relationship helps marketing managers build and manage complex marketing campaigns and ensures a tailored, "one-to-one" marketing scheme. Support Relationship enables customer support representatives to efficiently capture, track and resolve customer problems. eRelationship is a brand-new, next-generation "eCRM" suite of two integrated Web applications that enables companies to build "Internet relationship hubs" for conducting online marketing, sales and customer service business with enterprise Web customers, sales and service partners and prospects. In 1998, Microsoft's Industry Solutions Awards declared the Relationship suite Best Overall Customer Management Solution. Net Perceptions for E-commerce 4.0 interacts with customers on a one-on-one basis, familiarizes itself with their preferences and makes specific individualized recommendations to each customer. The software learns more about a customer each time he or she shops, and pools that knowledge with other customer information. Net Perceptions for Call Centers 1.0 coaches customer service representatives on how to cross-sell to customers while they're still on the line, using the same information as E-commerce 4.0. Net Perceptions' customers include Amazon.com, CDnow, Music Boulevard and Ticketmaster Online. Vantive Enterprise is Vantive's front-office application suite for customer relationship management. Vantive Sales handles field sales and telesales/telemarketing organizations, while Vantive Support enables customer service and support. Vantive HelpDesk tracks and catalogs incoming customer calls and their key technical assistance needs. Vantive FieldService keeps track of inventory and procurement, service requests and personnel in the field. Vignette's StoryServer 4 personalizes a website to suit each visitor's needs as his or her relationship with the site evolves. StoryServer 4 uses filtering technology to provide visitors with recommendations based on the choices of other visitors with similar tastes. Vignette's Syndication Server places a business's Web content on third-party affiliated websites, presenting products directly to an affiliated site's online audience, which might not regularly visit the original business's site. WorldTrak Sales & Marketing provides one-on-one marketing, account and opportunity management information to sales, marketing service and support personnel. WorldTrak Advanced Marketing uses scoring utilities and a campaign manager to segment customers into key groups and design an approach that will achieve the best results. WorldTrak Support automatically notifies support agents about new customers and provides complete customer contact and product history. WorldTrak Web provides access to leads and opportunity management capabilities over the Internet. WorldTrak e-Service, an enhanced version of Microsoft's Site Server Commerce Edition Version 3.0, offers intranet and extranet customer relationship management. What Next? As ERP vendors step into the CRM marketspace, many of the smaller CRM companies will be swallowed up in information alliances, mergers and acquisitions. It's a "big fish eats small fish" scenario. SAP, the German ERP giant, recently announced its own CRM offerings. CRM has tapped into something that ERP companies are finding valuable to their business: a way to grow! Related
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