Web-Centric CRM: Speed to Channel Integration
Nearly every business today shares the same concerns — increasing productivity, decreasing costs, finding new sources of revenue, impacting margins, and keeping current customers while finding new ones. Web-centric customer relationship management solutions have had an immediate impact on these concerns for the simple reason that they reduce complexity for customers and senior management responsible for strategic decision-making. These solutions let you pay closer attention to the forces of change that are redefining what customers and partners value in the marketplace. Web-centric CRM solutions are designed to let you concentrate on your customers and running your business rather than on your technology solution. In today's economy, more and more organizations are turning to Web-centric CRM solutions as a matter of survival.
Early CRM Investments Provide Targeted Approach
In the early-1990s, businesses invested heavily in call centers and field sales force automation applications, or first-generation CRM solutions. By the mid-1990s, second-generation CRM application systems expanded into field service automation and customer service and support solutions, assisting employees in effectively managing customer service issues (Figure 1).
First-generation call centers provided advanced telephony-based services and support for customers. The second generation of CRM introduced applications, offering improved efficiency for traditional call centers and enabling customer service representatives to access a variety of information bases to service customers more cost-effectively.
Sales force automation systems enabled sales professionals to conduct improved and meaningful discussions with their customers, including access to relevant and accurate data. These solutions enhanced the ability for customers, employees, and partners to perform tasks such as checking inventory, generating price quotes, and receiving current product information on demand.
Field service automation addressed the "last mile" of customer service, supporting the role of technicians and field service workers. This technology investment improved communication for more accurate dispatching, work order completion, and invoicing when the service call is completed.
Management Expectations Expand Beyond Traditional Boundaries With Web-Based Systems
More recently, third-generation CRM solutions evolved to include support for key relationships within the extended enterprise such as partner and employee relationship management (Figure 1). This enabled companies to economically tap changing market conditions and effectively organize the resources of a community comprised of employees, partners, and suppliers. Many software vendors began introducing specific CRM application modules to provide specific functionality and capabilities for improving these relationships.
Marketing assumed a new role in the CRM suite. Businesses began using customer information to support innovative brand development, leveraging direct and database marketing applications. Management launched new creative marketing campaigns directed at specific customer segments that could be measured, managed, and outsourced.
The third generation also introduced wireless technology, providing customers and the mobile workforce with new capabilities. Wireless devices enable secure, tailored multichannel access providing a whole new class of self-service capabilities deliverable at a fraction of the cost of traditional customer support operations.
Fragmented Information Fails to Provide the Complete Solution
Historically, these CRM solutions operated as individual "silos" of functionality. Data could not be easily shared across systems, applications, or business units. This resulted in the creation of complex, expensive, and labor-intensive customer support processes. Typically, each of these customer management systems required its own application software, operating system, hardware, and computer system management support teams.
Implementing a CRM solution proved to be more than investing in hardware and software technology. A full robust system involved changing a company from being organized around functions or business units to being organized around a customer or market segments. For some companies, this represents a complete mind-set shift in business processes and strategy.
A significant percentage of the time and cost to implement a CRM system can be spent addressing business and data integration challenges. To understand and add value to the customer's decision-making and corresponding buying process, management must focus on the business issue of integrating customer expectations.
The fact that senior, non-IT executives often do not give high marks to CRM projects within their organizations is evidence that many managers fail to consider these factors when implementing a solution. All too often the desire to cut costs and provide quick fixes through point solutions has significant, sometimes negative, downstream implications. To succeed, executives must align executable business strategies with cross-functional execution, a process that demands strong sponsorship, leadership, and the appropriate supporting technology.
Web-Centric Technology Enables Seamless Integration to Support New Processes
Today, Web-centric technology tears down the barriers and costs of these individual silos of information by delivering increased data and business process integration through the network. This shift in technology helps ensure that decision-making and customer support are based on access to fully integrated Web-based applications that can be reached anywhere, anytime, on any device (Figure 2).
Web-centric system architectures are entirely different from previous generations of CRM solutions. They are ideal for building capabilities designed to support a community of users accessing Web-based systems and services (customers, trading partners, dealers, suppliers, and employees). These solutions are based upon system design principles that centralize the processing, data management, security, and overall systems management in professionally-managed data center environments.
Web-Centric CRM Solutions Provide a More Balanced Approach
Web-centric CRM solutions shift application interactions from the customer's point of access (the client) to the systems maintained by the business (the server). Additionally, Web-centric CRM solutions are more integrated so that customer service representatives, field service agents, sales representatives, and other members of the enterprise contribute and share a consistent and meaningful experience with the customer. Since there is no reliance on the client's device, customers, employees, and partners may access and utilize applications via their work desktop, laptop, kiosks at libraries or airports, or mobile phones and other handheld devices in a highly secure environment. Reliability, availability, and scalability must be given careful attention to ensure that the most appropriate and capable solution is deployed.
Beyond improving customer service and increasing revenue, Web-centric technology provides an unprecedented opportunity for management to lower overall support costs and increase productivity. These costs savings simply were not feasible using earlier CRM technology.
Adoption of industry standards by CRM application vendors developing Web-centric CRM solutions drives down complexity, speeds deployment, enhances security, dramatically simplifies systems management, and delivers more reliability and scalability at a much lower total cost of ownership. Use of standards
like Java technology, XML, and Internet Protocol networks accelerates and enhances the ability of organizations to respond to market shifts.
Implementing the right Web-centric architecture is imperative for meeting the requirements and needs of both businesses and customers. The structure must also be designed and built to ensure that both short-term and long-term CRM capabilities are met.
The ability to develop a single customer view is critical to most organizations but hard to do, largely because of the necessary changes required in business process |
With Web-Centric Technology, Management Can Focus on Business Challenges Surrounding CRM Solutions
Web-centric technology opens the door for management to begin thinking about how to integrate their channels. Preparing for CRM solutions frequently requires new business processes to support sharing customer data across multiple organizations.
Forward-thinking organizations are using the Web and its collaborative facilities to more closely align product development, product marketing, sales, and delivery functions to match their customers buying processes. This alignment frequently involves sharing decision-making, customer intelligence, and process implementation, as well as redirecting the company's financial investments.
The ability to develop a single customer view is critical to most organizations but hard to do, largely because of the necessary changes required in business process. Identifying organizational needs and wants, and carefully assessing the gaps between organization CRM needs and actual CRM solutions is critical.
Once management has deployed Web-centric technology and addressed the business processes and policies that support integrated channels, customers can expect an increase in service levels and purchase options. By developing a single view of the customer, businesses are providing customers a single source for their needs. The end result is increased customer retention and loyalty — potentially yielding higher revenue per customer for the company.
The bottom line is that businesses cannot afford to view their customers in the same manner they did in the past. Companies must use new Web-centric technologies and business processes to retain customers and encourage those customers to willingly align themselves to that organization as the company they choose to do business with — today and in the future. Web-centric technology enables management to achieve low-cost revenue growth while decreasing costs and increasing productivity.
