Dears,
The year 2009 the world economy plunged into a severe recession from which it is now slowly recovering. However, the fundamental business needs that drive the requirement for effective and efficient customer interaction management have not changed: acquiring new customers, building tighter bonds of loyalty, and reducing the costs of marketing, selling, and servicing. Although many CRM technology projects were deferred or cancelled in 2009, as per Forrester wave 2010 organizations of all sizes are now investing again to improve the customer management capabilities they’ve neglected during the past 18 months. If you are a business process leader in a large organization, you’re challenged to pick the best CRM solutions to enable your company to capitalize on the upturn.
The B2B and B2C enterprises spotlight improved customer loyalty as their top goal. But B2B companies are also intent on capturing new customers, while B2C companies obsess about improving the customer experience
Forrester says
“To support achievement of these important priorities, CRM technology solutions are widely used by organizations of all sizes. Fifty-six percent of the 455 large organizations we recently surveyed in North America and Europe have already implemented a CRM solution — and many of these are investing more to upgrade their tool set. And an additional 17% have plans to adopt a CRM solution within the next 12 to 24 months”
To make savvy CRM solution investment decisions, you must understand and navigate a number of important trends:
CRM evolves into the extended CRM application ecosystem. Mature organizations understand that optimizing end-to-end customer-facing business processes means integrating solutions that extend beyond “traditional CRM”. In addition to marketing, sales, and service functionalities, you need to think about incorporating closely related capabilities like billing, order management, or contract management. Forrester calls this the “extended CRM application ecosystem,” supporting customer-facing cross-functional processes.
Customer service embraces real-time methods. We are seeing a rising number of inquiries from companies about how to improve their customer service capabilities. In 2010, contact center customer support needs to evolve to better serve customers who no longer rely on one venue for receiving information but instead engage multiple sources. In addition to checking a company’s Web site and its brochures, many customers research information on products and services from social networking sources such as blogs and online user ratings. With customers now requiring more real-time support, it’s essential to keep pace with their expectations and to respond to them in new ways.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) for CRM becomes the default choice. Forrester surveys show that
nearly half of apps professionals are actively engaged with SaaS assessments or deployment. And almost one-third of these those are using SaaS applications for CRM. Forrester observes that CRM technology buyers now look first at SaaS solutions to see if this approach can meet their needs before seriously considering an on-premises solution. And buyers with a large installed base of on-premises CRM solutions are re-evaluating where they should, and can, switch to a SaaS version.
CRM and business process management (BPM) solutions converge. Traditional enterprise applications tend to be monolithic in nature. Purchasers of these applications have become increasingly frustrated with the cost and complexity involved in customizing them to the needs of the organization. Moreover, they experience problems when upgrading, effectively setting the IT infrastructure in concrete as the business continues to evolve. Enter pure-play BPM vendors such as Pegasystems and Sword Ciboodle into the customer management space. These types of solutions have for some time offered integration capabilities to access enterprise apps at the component level, allowing the organization to model its processes and call relevant application elements at runtime. Forrester is now beginning to see expensive, complex, monolithic enterprise applications being broken into component pieces, with BPM suite engines sitting on top, orchestrating the appropriate elements needed to deliver highly customized solutions.
Interest in social CRM continues to build, but projects remain in pilot mode. Social technology adoption has increased tremendously during the past 12 months. Four in five US online adults now use social tools to connect with each other, compared with just 56% in 2007.As a consequence, technology vendors and some industry observers have jumped on to this bandwagon, offering an easy path to the promised land of more deeply engaged customers using Social Computing solutions. However, the proof-point use cases for leveraging social media are still emerging, and the business value of social media is still an unanswered question.10
Price/value trumps functionality in purchase decisions. Battered by two years of recession, buyers of customer management solutions have become extremely value-conscious. With major vendors like Oracle and SAP touting new releases of their CRM products, enterprises running older versions of CRM apps are mulling over whether to take the upgrade plunge.Business process professionals wonder if the benefits of upgrading their CRM solution will outweigh the costs. In addition, organizations looking at ways to escape hefty (and perceived low-value) vendor maintenance fees altogether will seriously consider not renewing their vendor maintenance agreement and moving to third parties. In a continuing difficult economy, first-time buyers are in a stronger position to push vendors to demonstrate value through pilot demonstrations and demand more flexible contract arrangements than in the past.
The year 2009 the world economy plunged into a severe recession from which it is now slowly recovering. However, the fundamental business needs that drive the requirement for effective and efficient customer interaction management have not changed: acquiring new customers, building tighter bonds of loyalty, and reducing the costs of marketing, selling, and servicing. Although many CRM technology projects were deferred or cancelled in 2009, as per Forrester wave 2010 organizations of all sizes are now investing again to improve the customer management capabilities they’ve neglected during the past 18 months. If you are a business process leader in a large organization, you’re challenged to pick the best CRM solutions to enable your company to capitalize on the upturn.
The B2B and B2C enterprises spotlight improved customer loyalty as their top goal. But B2B companies are also intent on capturing new customers, while B2C companies obsess about improving the customer experience
Forrester says
“To support achievement of these important priorities, CRM technology solutions are widely used by organizations of all sizes. Fifty-six percent of the 455 large organizations we recently surveyed in North America and Europe have already implemented a CRM solution — and many of these are investing more to upgrade their tool set. And an additional 17% have plans to adopt a CRM solution within the next 12 to 24 months”
To make savvy CRM solution investment decisions, you must understand and navigate a number of important trends:
CRM evolves into the extended CRM application ecosystem. Mature organizations understand that optimizing end-to-end customer-facing business processes means integrating solutions that extend beyond “traditional CRM”. In addition to marketing, sales, and service functionalities, you need to think about incorporating closely related capabilities like billing, order management, or contract management. Forrester calls this the “extended CRM application ecosystem,” supporting customer-facing cross-functional processes.
Customer service embraces real-time methods. We are seeing a rising number of inquiries from companies about how to improve their customer service capabilities. In 2010, contact center customer support needs to evolve to better serve customers who no longer rely on one venue for receiving information but instead engage multiple sources. In addition to checking a company’s Web site and its brochures, many customers research information on products and services from social networking sources such as blogs and online user ratings. With customers now requiring more real-time support, it’s essential to keep pace with their expectations and to respond to them in new ways.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) for CRM becomes the default choice. Forrester surveys show that
nearly half of apps professionals are actively engaged with SaaS assessments or deployment. And almost one-third of these those are using SaaS applications for CRM. Forrester observes that CRM technology buyers now look first at SaaS solutions to see if this approach can meet their needs before seriously considering an on-premises solution. And buyers with a large installed base of on-premises CRM solutions are re-evaluating where they should, and can, switch to a SaaS version.
CRM and business process management (BPM) solutions converge. Traditional enterprise applications tend to be monolithic in nature. Purchasers of these applications have become increasingly frustrated with the cost and complexity involved in customizing them to the needs of the organization. Moreover, they experience problems when upgrading, effectively setting the IT infrastructure in concrete as the business continues to evolve. Enter pure-play BPM vendors such as Pegasystems and Sword Ciboodle into the customer management space. These types of solutions have for some time offered integration capabilities to access enterprise apps at the component level, allowing the organization to model its processes and call relevant application elements at runtime. Forrester is now beginning to see expensive, complex, monolithic enterprise applications being broken into component pieces, with BPM suite engines sitting on top, orchestrating the appropriate elements needed to deliver highly customized solutions.
Interest in social CRM continues to build, but projects remain in pilot mode. Social technology adoption has increased tremendously during the past 12 months. Four in five US online adults now use social tools to connect with each other, compared with just 56% in 2007.As a consequence, technology vendors and some industry observers have jumped on to this bandwagon, offering an easy path to the promised land of more deeply engaged customers using Social Computing solutions. However, the proof-point use cases for leveraging social media are still emerging, and the business value of social media is still an unanswered question.10
Price/value trumps functionality in purchase decisions. Battered by two years of recession, buyers of customer management solutions have become extremely value-conscious. With major vendors like Oracle and SAP touting new releases of their CRM products, enterprises running older versions of CRM apps are mulling over whether to take the upgrade plunge.Business process professionals wonder if the benefits of upgrading their CRM solution will outweigh the costs. In addition, organizations looking at ways to escape hefty (and perceived low-value) vendor maintenance fees altogether will seriously consider not renewing their vendor maintenance agreement and moving to third parties. In a continuing difficult economy, first-time buyers are in a stronger position to push vendors to demonstrate value through pilot demonstrations and demand more flexible contract arrangements than in the past.
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