We Blog CRM

The proliferation of mobile communication devices that are now much more than just telephones has interested application providers. Mobile CRM can help traveling executives take timely decisions and furnish advice to demanding customers without having to rely on a data being relayed from an office.

Deploying a mobile CRM environment is a new experience for most businesses. The dynamics of the process are slightly different from those of a standard CRM deployment.  A good piece here at MyCustomer explaining in detail about the best ways to succeed with mobile CRM.

According to a recent study conducted by Aberdeen - “Tailor-Made CRM: Best Practices in Customization, Configuration, and Integration”, companies are making use of customizable applications and data collection technologies to customize and configure their applications so that these are tuned to company processes.An important finding was that “best-in-class” companies are much more likely to implement data integration for CRM than those that lag behind. CRM customization is driven by a desire to acquire and retain customers.

Best-in-Class companies said that they currently use data integration products (47 percent), contact management products (50 percent) and sales knowledge management products (38 percent) to “increase the effectiveness and functionality of the core CRM product.”

Given that the enterprise market is pretty saturated and renewing licenses is pretty much only way to make money off the big companies; it is not surprising that software vendors are looking to target the mid-market segment.The growth of SaaS has been a major factor in driving the attention of companies like SAP and Oracle towards SMBs.

SAP started offering MySAP CRM as a hosted service around two years ago. The company fell behind Salesforce.com and many other pure SaaS players, partly because of the delay in bringing out Business ByDesign. Yet, SAP has kept up its efforts in the SaaS CRM arena and in the recently concluded SAPPHIRE user conference, it announced new CRM functionality in its Business All-in-One solution for medium-sized companies.

CRM is supposedly on a comeback trail with a vengeance, hot on the heels of the last post I made regarding CRM’s comeback, here’s another one. This time it is from the UK and it says that faced with recession, companies are caught between trying to conserve finances and trying to get the best out of their CRM solutions in an effort to at least latch on to their existing customers if not get more customers for their customers base.

In the face of the economic slump, driving ROI is harder then ever. Paul Winters, managing director of CACI’s new customer management group, Marketing Solutions Division, says: “The world is changing in terms of acquisition, the days of mailing the Electoral Register three times is getting expensive and not working. There is now much more of an emphasis on driving value from your existing customer base.

“Retention is critical, you should do more with the customers that you already have as it’s from them that you are going to get the most from your revenue in hard economic times. It’s also tough to recruit new customers in the current climate.”

This is an aspect of CRM that is indeed worth a thought by industry worthies – how to align CRM and manufacturing. CRM focuses on the customers and aims to make the entire process customer-centric whereas most manufacturers belong to the school of thought that extols lean manufacturing where emphasis is placed on productivity and performance. CRM projects succeed only when the CRM philosophy is embraced across the organization and measurable customer-centric process are in place across the value chain.

The difficulty is in balancing lean manufacturing where the emphasis is on cutting costs with a customer-centric approach. CRM companies are finding it difficult to sell the concept of CRM to manufacturing companies. One of the issues that CRM vendors find discouraging is the trend of treating CRM as a desktop application with no strategic backing or accompanying changes in the thought processes of the company. Commence which provides on-premise as well as hosted CRM, has come up with a detailed list of forty best practices for industrial marketers that will help them to sell more effectively and obtain ROI more quickly.