CRM Success Chronicles: The Master Strokes

Dears,

There is a lot of negative information about CRM right now that is flooding the news. However the success rates are equally high. CRM is definitely a strategy that can be implemented effectively and successfully. CRM caters to companies of varied sizes. It helps focus on different problems and solutions. Statistics show that there are clear cases of excellence in CRM implementations that can be found right across a whole range of different industries. Research indicates that organizations can clearly measure the return they received from the implementation. What is important to note is that cases of past CRM failures are not in a position to judge the entire CRM technology. Research shows that a CRM success story is easy to find.Some of the companies whose CRM implementation has been successful include:
Canon (Japan)
AMD
Hitachi
Nokia
Engage
Pepsi Americas
Sovereign Bank
HP
What most of these companies had was a clear idea of all their business processes. They understood their business needs before implementing CRM. They had managed to identify leaders and the best performers in the organization. They have also managed to involve key executives at the highest level and get the message to everyone in the organization about the importance of CRM.

The benefits of CRM implementation are huge. They include:

· Higher percentage of cross-selling
· Attracting new customers
· Closing deals faster
· Quicker and more efficient response to customer leads and customer information
· Simplification of marketing and sales processes
· Understanding customer needs
· Better customer service
· Improved responsiveness and understanding
· Building customer loyalty
· Build a knowledge base for customer support
· Control marketing campaigns
· Analyzing marketing campaigns
· Viewing the actual profit of each campaign
· Quickly view customer statistics and analytics
· Maintain exact info about the target market
· Store product prices and information
· View sales statistics and analytics
· Control current projects
· Achieve excellent customer service
· Being aware of customer needs/ reacting to them
· Understanding and responding to customers' needs
· Maintaining consistency
· Achieving an efficient, integrated business system
· Achieving organizational discipline

Steps to Becoming a CRM Success Story

· Companies should adopt stringent rules that ensure that the organization finds appropriate solutions for its customers.
· Objectives need to be fixed prior to starting on a CRM project. Also the existing processes need to be integrated with the solution.
· Assessing data quality issues should be undertaken compulsorily and companies need to make sure that they undertake the required measures before implementing CRM.
· A company should strive to understand the problems of the customers in order to secure CRM benefits.
· Create a single view about the customer with all the information available about him and make this information easily available to every one in the organization. Doing this is most essential.
· Outside resources need to be brought in if required. The need for outside resources has to be carefully studied and adopted if essential.
· Dynamic changes are possible only when sufficient technology is in place. IT enables this as it facilitates change within the organization and enables it to adapt. Hence the IT department needs to be incorporated in all respects.
· All information should be cleansed before entering.
· The solution should aid organizational objectives to the hilt.
· The various departments should be collaborated.
· Organizations should endeavor to clearly Establish Clear Business Objectives and a business plan as well that is in sync with the CRM goals also.
· A company needs to secure the acceptance of its employees to the CRM implementation
· Organizations also need to initially and right through the implementation involve top management as this is crucial to success.
· Consultants should be availed of. Their expertise would go a long way in getting the most out of the CRM benefits.


Bell Canada's Success
Bell Canada is easily Canada's largest communications company and a CRM success story. It boasts of almost 28 million customer connections and manages to provide some of the most comprehensive communication services. These services aside from being innovative have also been a source of stability to residential and business customers in the Canadian region. The company basically serves to provide their customers with solutions that smack of ease of integration and simplicity to their customers. They basically cater to all their customers' communication requirements like the telephone, internet, wireless, voice over IP and digital television. They try to provide information and technology for communications to top business enterprises within the Canadian region and beyond. They cater to a variety of organizations ranging from the small and mediocre enterprises to the large corporates. Small and medium industries have benefited immensely from their services. Their services include internet access, data services, voice services, wireless services, satellite television, long distance phone services etc. Since customer needs are growing Bell is currently trying to simplify the existing processes and introduce bundled services by moving towards a single, bill. It manages an extensive local access network providing local and long distance phone services to customers. It also enables the provision of a wide range of services for consumers. Bell's phone services include call display, call waiting, voice mail etc. A classic example of CRM success is that which Bell Canada found. Its successful implementation of CRM saw profound results in just6 months.
Pre - CRM Scenario
The solutions, business processes and methods being employed prior to the CRM solution clearly did not fulfill or meet any of the business needs. Bell Canada needed a full fledged customer centric strategy that was catering to the company requirements. After scrutiny they embarked on the implementation of CRM and decided that they will opt for its advantages. They basically encountered a problem that the existing disparate solutions created a lot of extra work for employees and basically increased the task load. This had resulted in a decrease in employee satisfaction and posed numerous problems. In addition to this BELL required its front and back end operations of its shared services centre to be integrated. This step could not be achieved through existing processes. Also the access to current employee case status and the reporting capabilities was required. All this led to the installation of CRM solutions.
Implementing CRM
The result was that CRM customer service & support initiatives were availed of. The CRM benefits were deployed to a total of 200+ users in 6 months. The staff was trained in the ability to use multi language systems; This helped them immensely especially when dealing with multi lingual customers and customer data. The key elements employed in the implementation were speed, data integration, and easy usage and increased efficient reporting capabilities.
The Result?
What did BELL ultimately witness? The result was increased and better customer service from employees amongst almost seven groups. Another advantage was the internal efficiency that was created within the organization. The flexibility and customization traits of CRM enabled a reduction in the total case volume.The ease of usage and its adaptability also resulted in an increase in the integration of data between the systems. The main point to note here is the fact that the entire implementation required very little time and was carried out with very little effort. Speed was a dominating factor in this implementation. The organization was able to acquire the business requirements it needed so much.

It's imminently clear that focusing on the failure rate of CRM is the wrong approach. Organizations need to focus more on the 'CRM success story'. What's needed most is being able to focus on the success rate and get the most out of the CRM implementation by employing the right practices prior, during and after the CRM implementation.

Your P&C

DC*

Business intelligence ROI, The Mind Game

Dears,
Justifying the value of business intelligence (BI) investments is uniquely challenging, according to analysts and end users -- particularly because there's no straightforward ROI equation. Unlike some IT systems that replace more expensive systems, manual processes or headcount, BI's benefits are often "soft" or intangible. While there may be some ROI metrics that support a business case, BI projects often require a bit of faith on the part of the people writing the checks -- and some savvy selling by IT and business users.

Here's my 5 cents about calculating ROI and effectively justifying BI investments.

1. Collaboration between IT and business is essential.
It's difficult to justify BI's price tag as an IT overhead cost .IT needs to work with business users to figure out the business value of a BI application. That's exactly what BI Champion does. While his team provides guidance and estimates resource usage and technology costs, they look to business users to justify the project's value. We can say how much it will cost, but someone in the business ought to be able to quantify that benefit.

2. Don't get hung up on hard metrics.
One of the biggest challenges in BI projects is determining accurate before-and-after metrics. If you don't know where you're beginning from, it's difficult to work out the benefit at the end -- what your ROI is. You need accurate metrics at the beginning and accurate metrics at the end. But then some organizations run into a chicken-and-egg problem. Without a BI system, they don't have accurate metrics. Without accurate metrics, they have trouble justifying the potential ROI of a new BI system. So organizations should do their best to find some hard measures, such as where BI deployments will reduce costs or increase sales, but the real focus should be on soft benefits.

3. ROI calculations are difficult -- and not always necessary.
The BI projects always have some kind of ROI calculation, he said. Some projects enable obvious cost reductions by eliminating manual processes. But most initiatives require collaboration with business people to determine ROI metrics, asking questions such as, 'How many clients will this new reporting tool help us gain or retain?' The calculation is different for each project.
There's not a magic ROI equation for BI. There's clearly value and benefits, but that doesn't really get to the ROI. What you need to focus on is: 'What is the business value?' 'How am I driving the business forward? Pushing ROI justification problems back to a potential BI vendor. Vendors may be able to provide references from customers -- in similar industries -- that can share their metrics. The supplier should be a source of ideas and best practices, and if they can't help you justify the investment, you really have to question whether you want to go with that supplier.

4. The "soft" benefits of BI are the most important.
While hard metrics are important, organizations should sell their executives on BI's soft benefits. The main benefits you get from BI are intangible benefits of strategic value, such as faster reporting, better management information, better decision making and more productive users. And even without hard metrics, there are often soft benefits that executives can appreciate. For example, a recent corporate performance management project at FMCG enabled the company to get rid of a manual, spreadsheet-based planning process -- improving visibility and accountability More than that they were able to identify KRA they need to focus and improve their brownie points.

5. Executive sponsorship really helps.
I know of a BI champion who was first trying to sell his management on the concept of an enterprise data warehouse, he wrote a white paper explaining the potential benefits and circulated it widely. This document made its way to an executive who promised to help the champion make the project a reality. Executive sponsorship makes it much easier to sell these kinds of soft, intangible benefits. It helps to find somebody with credibility and a lot of political capital and attach yourself to them if you're trying to get buy-off for the first time

Good Luck

Your P&C
DC*

Orchestrating Your Customer Information: CRM Symphony

Dears.
In any CRM implementation customer view point is essential. Therefore it becomes perfunctory that the necessary information regarding their profiles, behaviors, likes and dislikes are orchestrated together. Aside from its absolute necessity for the implementation of CRM, the collation of customer information is essential to an organization. It is only with respect to this that most organization decisions are made and therefore the assembling of this data is vitally essential.

Why collect Customer Information?

New Products
New products and services can sometimes be the result of customer surveys. When customers actually suggest new ideas and they prove to be rewarding companies sometimes take them up on their suggestions and innovate new products. This information can also be obtained from customer feedback

Room for Improvement
Organizations can spot opportunities for improvement when they listen intently to what the customer has to say. In CRM customer view is the most important one and should be paid attention to.

Customer Retention
Learning the customer, what is most important to him and catering to his needs goes a long way in maintaining customer retention.

Gaining old Customers
Lost customers can be recovered and sales thus boosted as a direct consequence of gaining information about why they left in the first place.

Customer Information can be collected from sources like:

· Information collected from other companies
· An organization can opt for interviewing competitors customers to get additional information on what they can do to improve their products.
· Information collected from sister concerns or parent companies as a result of the customer's interaction with them.
· Information colleted over the phone, emails or even snail mail
· It is crucially important to gather information that has already been obtained within the organization and give it to the concerned employees
· Customer information can be obtained from the internet
· Rather than opting for paper or electronic surveys it is often better to use direct interviews as direct interaction always enables the gaining of more information from the right source
· Information that is collected from application forms, customer surveys, sweepstakes coupon entries, stores etc.
· Information collected when the company website is visited

Here's what you can do to orchestrate 'more effective' customer information:

Listen to the Customer
It is imperative to create an atmosphere wherein the employee ensures that he listens to the customer. Valuable information is gained this way. A viable atmosphere wherein even negative feedback should be encouraged is essential if the company hopes to gain valuable customer suggestions. It is most important to listen to the people who are closest to the products and services. Doing this provides a powerful tool to collect information on customer likes and dislikes.

Logical Thinking
It is important to think logically and use the primary resources in the areas that are most important to CRM to listen effectively to the customer in order to avoid wastage of resources.

Put yourself in the Customers Shoes
When a company looks at things from a customer's perspective, it will see the difficulties a customer often faces with the concerned products. It is essential to focus more on this than the companies own perspective. This is essential as companies obtain an understanding of the customer's use of the product, collect the required information and translate it into what is required for betterment.

Take the Good with the Bad
Most customers will be reluctant to reveal information that they are not happy with. Addressing direct questions is essential and needs to be done in order to find exactly what the problems are that customers face.

An organization can opt for any of the above methods or all of them. Depending on the resources an organization possesses it can decide. It is important to focus on the CRM customer view throughout the implementation of CRM and indulge in the usage of the collated customer data, effectively and efficiently.

Good Luck

Your P&C

DC*

CRM Strategies that Backfires

Dears,
Your company knows that it wants a good robust CRM system. But the CFO, nervous about the costs, starts to suggest strategies that could keep things under control. Meanwhile, you know the implementation team has some ideas that go in a completely different direction.
How can you manage executive expectations that may be based on misinformation? This article will cover common traps that you should avoid, followed by advice on the best ways to save some real money. The advice applies to any modern SaaS CRM or SFA system

Bad Strategy #1: Believe the Illusion of Forever

In your computer science studies, the focus was on building industrial strength systems that would stand the test of time. This perspective is totally inappropriate for a CRM system and leads to a series of progressively expensive mistakes.
The reason: the business requirements for a CRM system are likely to change so radically over time that the system design life will be less than 5 years. In some industries, the tenure of a VP of Sales or a CMO is only 18 months, and even a CEO change is likely every few years. With each new leadership change will come shifts in market strategy, sales tactics, and product line emphasis. New regulations come into play, and new partnerships become important (or not).
Everything you "designed in" the system at the outset is likely to become irrelevant or counterproductive years later. Even if you were to stay with the same CRM platform over time, there are good reasons to re-implement the system from scratch after 5 years.
This short design life means you need to get the business payoff out of the system quickly. The payback for the investment should be less than 18 months in most cases—and any benefits projected beyond 5 years should be discounted almost entirely.
Of course, you don't want to have a throw-away system that is too fragile to survive the inevitable revisions. But it's a big mistake to over-engineer your CRM system, the scope of data to be imported, and the range of external system integrations. Perfectionism doesn't pay.

Bad Strategy #2: Too Many Goals

When you're an IT pro selling the organization on the need for the potential benefits of a CRM system, it's easy to fall into the trap of "happy ears." Everyone hears what they want to, and the expectations for the system ratchet skyward. Even if you could delver on all the individual expectations, the total cost of the project will be laden with waste.
The problem here is a cacophony of goals—unprioritized, politicized, often contradictory or even impossible—that leads to a project that is ill-defined and hard to execute. Expensive areas of the project aren't well enough defined in terms of business process or business champion, so the project team flounders. Other areas of the project may not be well enough defined in terms of the economic payoff, so there's nothing in the numerator of the benefit-to-cost ratio.
Better to have a very small number of goals for the system, each with a clear owner, metric of success, and deadline. Every goal should be prioritized, with no ties. After you've registered some quick wins that demonstrate results and get users committed to the system add the next one or two goals as you build the system out incrementally.

Bad Strategy #3: Wrong Yardstick

When evaluating CRM system success and progress, it's all too common to measure the wrong factors, or measure the wrong way. At the project level, progress shouldn't be judged by how much system functionality you deploy. The system features by themselves are an empty shell with no business value. Instead, you should be measuring the value of the data asset that the system contains. What proportion of your current business is represented there, and how often are users accessing the customer relationship information? The first order of business is user adoption: how quickly and deeply are they using the system? The second order of business is the value of the orders flowing through the system per month.
At a more fundamental level, make sure that the success metrics you're using are clear, coherent, and agreed to on all sides. Watch out for the Great Expectations problem described above—it gives you a set of metrics that are confused, ambiguous, or working at cross-purposes.

Bad Strategy #4: Build Rome in a Day

The story is as old as the computer industry itself. Fred Brooks' classic The Mythical Man Month described how the larger the systems project, the more likely it was to be late and over budget. The complete-system launch, sometimes called a Big Bang project, just doesn't work very well for software. The warning signs of Big-Bang thinking include: Infrequent project milestones; large, complex, monolithic project deliverables; little consideration of political or change-management issues; fake, vague, or overstated requirements, particularly for scope of system integration or historical data; scope creep.
Better to deliver incrementally, deploying something of value to the business at least once a quarter. This results in support from both the grass roots and the executive champion, so you can win the vote of confidence for the next increment of system expansion budget.

Bad Strategy #5: Focus on Costs, Not Business Impact
It's easy to focus on cost, because there are fairly clear data and familiar tools for analysis. When you do the cost analysis, focus on TCO (initial cost, particularly for SaaS CRM, is completely misleading). As mentioned above, this cost analysis should look at a 3 to 5 year time horizon: anything longer is unrealistic, and anything shorter is foolish.
But cost analysis should only be done to ensure the proper budgetary allocation, not drive the system scoping decision. The business results of doing a proper CRM system should totally trump costs (they'd better!). The goal of your CRM system should be to raise the profitability of revenues: Lowering the cost of customer acquisition, increasing customer lifetime value, and reducing waste in sales, marketing, support, and service delivery. These business results may be tough predict, but you should have a model of the kinds of improvements you're shooting for, by answering questions such as:
1. How much more revenue could you realistically get if you could close the trickiest 1 percent of customer deals?
2. What would be the impact of shortening the sales cycle by one week?
3. What would it mean to the bottom line if marketing could divert 10 percent of its programs from people who aren't likely to buy and instead spend on people who were more likely to buy?
4. What would it mean for customer support costs if you could handle each customer issue with one less phone call?

Focusing on this type of business benefit helps prioritize your requirements, understand the business drivers, and avoid "requirements" with a questionable payoff.
After this list of "don'ts, We need to focus on Top 5 Strategies that would strengthen your CRM project and adoption. Post me your comments and some food for thought for our readers.

Your P&C
DC*

Dealing with Exceptions, The CRM Way to Salvage Damaged Relationships.

Dears,
When they have issues, customers want to know that they are having their individual concerns addressed; nothing is more effective at sending that message than a make-good that makes sense for their specific situations. This is giving something away -- but not for nothing.
Earlier in my career, I worked for a banking major. Nothing better prepared me for a career examining CRM than the sight of enormous corporations with immense customer bases failing to build any kind of relationship with their users and instead resorting to price as their major differentiator. Worse yet was the service aspect of these businesses. Perhaps because they were in constant churn-and-acquire mode, the resources devoted to service suffered. When something went wrong with a customer's service, the result was a process that, in effect, punished the customer.
The common scenario in Telecom is that Service calls usually required a customer to stay home awaiting the arrival of a service person, who might or might not be able to diagnose or repair the problem. If it could not be repaired, then the customer might have to repeat the process the next day.I went through this when I moved houses; the phone provider installed my new line in someone else's house. It took 3 more visits from service personnel to figure out the problem and get my phone working.
Exceptional Opportunities
As common as they are, these service issues are not the norm. They're the exceptions -- but in cases like these, where there is limited contact between the company and the customer, the exception can seem like the norm. When that happens, the customer's likely to start looking to buy from someone who promises a better -- or at least different -- norm.However, the exception is also an opportunity. Studies have shown again and again that customers who report a problem to a company and then have it remedied in a reasonable way and in a reasonable amount of time are far more loyal customers than those who never experience problems.No matter how effective your company is at what it does, customers will have problems. How can you use CRM to convert those exceptions into relationship-building opportunities?
Tailor the Response
Step one is to have an organization-wide understanding of this very concept. Too many companies look at responses to customer problems through a cost-benefit analysis prism: "How much will it cost us to really satisfy this customer, and is it more than the cost of losing the customer?" Flip that equation on its head: "How much will it cost to lose this customer, and how much do we stand to gain over the customer lifetime by solving the problem and gaining long-term loyalty?"How do you get that long-term loyalty? First, of course, you need to fix the problem. Beyond that, understand your customer and why that customer came to you in the first place. That data should already exist in your CRM database.
Understand what customer used as the major criteria in selecting your company: price, features, payment terms, flexibility in capacity, ability to respond to new product requests, or any other aspect of your business that attracted the customer. Hopefully, your sales reps collected this data during the selling process.Then, offer a token of your gratitude to the customer tailored to take advantage of what initiated the relationship. That might be a discount, some free hours of service, or a complimentary product that you know the customer can use. It should not be some set apology item that's trotted out in every case -- it should be tailored to the individual customer.
Not for Nothing
This is giving something away -- but not for nothing. It's to demonstrate your organization's good faith intention to make things right and to cement the relationship in a visible way with the decision makers among your customers.It also pays to train the first line of defense in these situations to start the process of transforming a complaint into an opportunity. That means training for your call center staff to deal with unhappy customers, and giving the staff the power to start the process rolling.
If it's done right, dealing with these exceptions can ensure not only that customers stay with you after you solve their problems, but also that they remember how well they were treated when they broached their concerns -- and perhaps talk to their peers about how your company dealt with them.
If you handle exceptions well, and with the proper mindset, you can convert customers with problems into customer advocates
Just Do it , The CRM Way.
Your P&C
DC*

CRM Implementation “Quick” ees, Just Do it Faster and Better

Dears,

CRM projects can have some very tricky moments, particularly when it comes to integrating with other customer-facing and internal systems. They can also be quite labor intensive when it comes to normalizing, deduping, cleansing, and converting data. But in many CRM projects, those issues aren't the biggest contributors to schedule slips. Look closely: the larger the CRM project, the more likely that the delays are coming from outside of IT. No, it's not time to beat up your vendors. It's time to engage more closely with your users and project sponsors.

Why? Because a key problem in CRM projects is getting permission to proceed. The team is waiting for user feedback, executive policy decisions, or management approval. CRM projects are much more vulnerable to this issue than most enterprise applications because the requirements and business processes are much more variable than, for example, an accounting or HR system. Since CRM systems provide the most business benefit when they are tightly aligned with business policies and personal preferences of the sales and marketing VPs, fit really matters. Organizational politics really matter. And some of the priorities will change with every reorg...which in sales and marketing can happen pretty frequently.

So, approval cycles -- quick, definitive, and broadly communicated -- are a key success factor for tight CRM projects. There are two levels of approval cycle -- and the project lead can only do one of them by him/herself. The second one, senior management has to help with.

User Feedback

User adoption is a key metric for CRM systems. You don't have to believe in Agile to know that engaging users early and collecting their feedback on a regular basis are the best ways to avoid waste and rework. In our CRM projects, we want users to try out features-in-progress at least once a week.
Why so often? Because users are busy people, and they tend to forget what they told you. Further, as their personal goals and priorities shift over time, it can be tough to even keep the users on topic (sometimes they'll give you feedback on a different system than the one you're working on). Asking for feedback incrementally, and publishing user feedback in a Collaborate Site or Portal, will improve the quality and relevance of their input.
It's also important to get feedback from the right users. Sometimes, the people who have time to spare for a functional usability session aren't the ones who matter. Other times, people who just love to be critics aren't setting realistic standards. Choosing the right users is something of an art, but an art that the project lead must learn.

Even though the characteristics of the review users will vary by organization, I recommend to use the following strategies.

• The feedback team should be selected at the start of the project, and explicitly authorized by their managers to spend an hour a week (or whatever you need) for however many weeks the project needs them. Try to keep the team stable for at least one release cycle.

• The team should be about equal thirds: power users/computer sophisticates, luddites/passive-resisters, and people who work closely with another system in addition to the CRM.

• The team should be reasonably centralized. Even though much of the review should be done over the Web (and in some cases must be remotely to be realistic), it's easier to coordinate and schedule the sessions when the team isn't on the road or scattered across several time zones.

• The team should be comprised of people who have the bosses' ear. Decisions and approval cycles go faster if the boss trusts their representative, better yet if the boss delegates the authority on small decisions to the team member. Beware fake delegation, where the boss overrules or contradicts their delegate!

It is typically much faster to collect user review feedback in individual meetings. Of course group sessions would be a better use of engineering's time, but the scheduling impact of a single meeting can be far worse. It's easy to lose a week's time just trying to coordinate a 5-way meeting, and the resulting traffic jam effects can stall parts of the project and idle your engineers.

Management Decisions - four Ps (priorities, policy directives, people, and process)

In CRM projects, management decisions about the four Ps (priorities, policy directives, people, and process) can be pivotal to CRM project success. The more important the decisions, the longer it takes to get the meeting...and the bigger the schedule impact of decision changes.

So it's critical that the project managers and track leads be able to tap the political power of the CRM executive sponsor as well as top IT leadership. The specifics depend on your corporate culture, but it's generally better to have short, quick decision cycles and avoid the "summit meeting" impulse. Of course, sometimes a big meeting devoted to CRM is required, but too often these are non-productive because the focus tends to wander away from the specifics of what you need decided. We've all lived through meetings like this where decisions from previous meetings were overturned, almost invariably clobbering the schedule.

No matter how executive decisions are made, it's best if there is a signoff sheet at the meeting, and the decision published on your Collaborate Site or Portal to reduce the chances of misinterpretation and eliminate plausible denial.

Trust me, your schedule will thank me six months from now.

Your P&C
DC*

CRM Projects: Odyssey of Fixed Bid executions

Dears,

Welcome to the Odyssey of Fix Bid CRM Project Executions,The known realities and unknowns exhibted here is not to say that Fix Bid Projects has little or no value but to make sure we signup for Win-Win Situation with your partner and realize the synergy of successfull CRM exections.

Imagine a CRM consulting project with inadequately specified requirements, no clear internal project manager, and ill-defined success criteria. Your consultant bids it on a time and materials (T&M) basis. You're in a rush, no time for a detailed RFP - you know the consultant can do the job, but you need a budgetary number to get approval. We've all been through this drill: somebody brilliant suggests that this has to be fixed price, it'll be easier to get project approval and manage to conclusion that way. You know, just like it would be when buying servers.
But you're not buying servers: you're buying services. While 80% of CRM projects are formulaic and could be bid as a "standard project," the other 80% of the project work is not only a one-off, but an unknown. Nobody actually knows the requirements, or the ramifications of "something simple," or the shape of your data, or the tricky parts of external interfaces. You may think you're signing up for a three-hour tour, but you're on the way to Gilligan's Island.

While fixed price projects are easy to measure, the simplistic calendar-and-budget approach misses the point. Will the project result in any value to the business? Did it satisfy the letter of the requirements without solving any real problems? Let's look at this a little deeper.

You don't want to pay too much, so you get competitive bids. But all consultants have a powerful incentive to bid too high: they need the LEG room to manage the risk of scope creep, weak project management, and ambiguous success criteria. This is particularly endemic in CRM projects that have to satisfy right-brained types in Sales and Marketing. Look at it from the consultants' economic perspective: a fixed price project must be more profitable to compensate for the extra risk.

Let's say you get lucky. Your consultant made a low fixed price bid. You win...except you don't. The consultants will be spending all their time during the project trying to figure out how to deliver as little as possible and develop some engineering change orders (ECOs) or other tricks to get you to pay more on their money-losing bid.
Now let's say the consultant is a saint. They don't try to up sell you, and they eat the losses on the project. What happens next? They lose their talent. And no, those people won't come to work for you. So all the institutional knowledge they brought and the business process expertise they developed for you on the project is gone. You get to pay for the learning curve all over again.

What do you think the chances are that the consultant's bid is within 10% of the effort required to make your team happy? Or that you had the foresight to tell the consultant at least 90% of your actual requirements before the statement of work? And what about the rubber yardstick of satisfying your users? Do you really think you can do that consistently, even when your own staff hasn't even analyzed your database before getting the bid?

Fixed Price Discovery, T&M Tasks

A common solution for these issues is to have the discovery and detailed requirements setting phase of the engagement be fixed price (perhaps 10% of the expected project value), with the actual implementation tasks as T&M. Even if the follow-on tasks are done as fixed price, this is a good step forward in containing risk on both sides of the table.

This approach provides incentives for both the consultant and the internal project manager to manage scope creep, make sensible tradeoffs, and apply some "value engineering." But there's still the issue of the unknown: the subtle data corruption or the API glitch or the political subterfuge coming from the Sales team (who - for reasons that are never clear - subtly oppose the project). In CRM projects of any size, these unknowns and unpleasant surprises can account for 25% of the effort. Still think your team's initial task estimation is within 10% of the optimal outcome (where the users are actually satisfied, but without unneeded bells and whistles)?

There's an old adage in politics, "If you can get the other side working on the wrong question, it doesn't matter what answer they come up with." Maybe "how do I get it done at for $X" is asking the wrong question. All too often, the word "it" isn't tightly defined, guaranteeing a suboptimal answer. And the unspoken issue is trust and tight management.

Agile Fixed Price?

You may not practice Agile in your organization. Fine. But know that CRM system deployments are best done in this incremental, user-centered style. Salesforce.com and SugarCRM even build their products that way. If an incremental deployment style is the right way to do CRM, how does that fit with a fixed price project? Agile projects do have fixed budgets and schedules - in fact, proper Agile projects have a better record of meeting those targets than conventional IT projects do. But Agile projects dont have a pre-determined set of features for any specific delivery. The requirement "cards" and "stories" are continuously evaluated and re-prioritized through the life of the project. Why? Because the business doesn't really know what's going to be valuable until it sees it, or even uses it for a while. In a perverse way, Agile is an ideal fit for CRM work precisely because the details and ramifications of your requirements are seldom known until the project is underway.

So an Agile project would have fixed price and a time-boxed schedule, but a variable set of deliverables. You get the most valuable deliverables that could be produced for a given budget, but you don't get a fixed SOW.Making Agile work for consulting engagements will require the same project management skills and attitude adjustment that it does for internal projects. But most consultants are living the Agile lifestyle already. So maybe the right question to be asking here isn't "how do we get it for $X?" but "given our fixed resources, how do we get the business payback from CRM in the fastest way?"

Good Luck and Welcome your thoughts

Your P&C
DC*

Method in the Madness : Put Your Customers Ahead of Your Capabilities

Dears,

There is a method in this madness of saying “Put Your Customers Ahead of
Your Capabilities”. You will understand as you read through this
article.

Toyota and Dell both did it for a while but then stopped. American Express, Cisco, GE, Tesco, Trader Joe's and Godrej, among others, all kept at it, and have continued to reap the benefits. "It" refers to the adoption of an “Customer Ahead” strategy that calls on companies to start with their market when they design their strategy, rather than limit themselves by asking what they can do with existing resources.

Companies that have adopted an 'customer ahead” strategy are those with a focus on creating and keeping customers by delivering superior customer value. They do that by standing in the customer's shoes and viewing everything the company does through the customer's eyes. Think of customer value as the lens on the strategy.
"Insidethinking", on the other hand, begins by asking, 'What are we good at? What are our capabilities and products? How can we use our resources more efficiently?' It's a resource-based view of the firm that is inherently limiting because it means the company is slow to respond to major changes in the market. we look at a number of companies that began with an 'outside in' lens but then became myopic, falling into 'inside out' vision -- companies like Toyota and Dell for example.
Strategies are especially stressed during a recession, when companies must align their cost base with rapidly shrinking revenues in order to protect earnings. The management team focuses almost entirely on internal processes -- improving productivity, downsizing and so forth. This response is appropriate when your goal is to drive short-run earnings. But if it becomes the predominant point of view on strategy, you are highly vulnerable to shifts in the market, new technologies, new channels or the entrance of new competitors, so an 'inside out' myopia ends up making you vulnerable.
American Express is an example of a company that didn't fall into that trap. It was able to sustain an 'outside in' approach during the recession when a lot of companies were trying to manage earnings by cutting back everything that moved, including core R&D and new product launches. Amex and others said, 'We are going to take an earnings hit anyway, and the last place we want to cut back is innovation. So we will continuously invest in learning about our customer and use this as an opportunity to gain an advantage by improving our value proposition.' Indeed, research going back 30 years suggests that the best time to gain market share is during recessionary upheavals.
Why do companies become inward looking? Many that at one time had been 'outside in' become 'inside out' mainly because they get positive reinforcement in the short run. If you focus on improving efficiency, you get results -- for a while. That's what happens in a recession. A second reason: Strategy theorists argue that resources exist to be used and the task of managers is to improve and fully exploit then. This is certainly a worthwhile aim but, on its own, it is an inherently limiting and unbalanced approach.
We talk a lot about Amazon as a paragon of 'outside in' thinking. It started with an online bookstore, then went beyond books and asked, 'What do our customers really want?' They are now a big provider of cloud computing and web services for their channel partners, and of course there is the Kindle. So [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos would say, 'Hey, rather than ask what are we good at, ask who our customers are and what they need. We will figure out how to give it to them.' By shifting the focus so significantly, you open up a much broader array of opportunities.
Toyota is an example of a company that began to focus on the wrong metrics. It became obsessed, not with what the customer needed, but with beating General Motors and becoming big. The company became too internally focused, tried to grow way too fast and lost sight of quality. It became too much of a 'how fast can we drive this growth" approach. As we know, they ran into quality problems.
Procter & Gamble has for years required every one of its executives to visit customers three times a year. Another company is India-based Godrej -- a conglomerate that is involved in industries ranging from appliances and consumer goods to health care and security. India has 26 states representing 26 different markets. Each member of the C-suite owns a state, right down to the company's secretary, and has to be out there in that state four to five times a year to understand what is happening with customers, competitors and channels. This means that every state, in effect, has its own advocate.
In many markets, the distinction is made between consumers -- you and me, the final buyer -- and customers, which would be channels and channel intermediaries. We chose not to worry about that distinction but to go with the more generic term "customers," which includes both. It can refer to anyone who is making a choice based upon comparative value propositions.
The customer buys the expectation of benefits. They are going to patronize the company that delivers the best package of benefits at the most reasonable total cost. In B2B markets, customers win by getting better solutions and by absorbing less risk. A successful company will offer solutions that help the customer make money. GE Wind Power is an example. GE entered this industry in 2003 after buying the remnants of the Enron wind power business. It was a small operation but it gave GE the chance to learn about, and gain insight into, the wind power market. The biggest market at the time was Germany, mainly because the German government provided very substantial subsidies. The market back then was very fragmented, and the belief was that you had to have different sizes of wind power turbines to meet different property specifications. At one point, Siemens offered eight or nine different sizes tailored to a specific location.
The industry had essentially lost sight of the market. Companies never looked at the world through the customer lens and figured out that reliability -- the percentage of time the machinery is working -- and efficiency -- the ability to convert the wind into energy -- were the real keys to making money. So GE Wind Power invested in understanding customer requirements, and based on that, decided to challenge the whole industry model. They built only one size of wind turbine, but they made it extremely reliable. Plus the company used its existing expertise in jet engine turbines to make the most efficient motors anybody has.
The key story here is that GE's insights into their customers gave them a strong sense of where to put their R&D dollars. Subsequent to that, they offered a service guarantee that their turbines would be working 98% of the time.
An 'outside in or customer ahead' strategy means looking at the world as a positive sum game. A lot of the strategy literature, especially the competitive forces approach, is all about intensity of competition. The world is seen as a zero sum game, i.e., "If the customer has more power, we lose." That's not a good mindset. It doesn't help. You need to go into a collaborative conversation with the customer.

Good Luck

Your P&C
DC*

Sierra Atlantic FZ LLC Gitex Invite - Visit us @ Gitex Technology Week ( Oct 17th to 21st)

Dears,
Sierra Atlantic helps organizations implement the most effective IT solutions and services to create an agile enterprise that responds quickly to change and opportunity.We at Sierra Atlantic harness the best-of-breed Oracle New Economy & Edge solutions in the applications and technology space, enabling enterprises with the appropriate resources to improve business processes, reduce enterprise costs, improve workforce effectiveness and help attract and retain customers.To learn more about our innovative approaches in the Oracle Solutions and Services space to achieve business agility and improved performance, Please visit us at Gitex Technology Week.
Venue: Dubai International Convention CentreBooth: WS-7 in Hall 5 (Oracle Pavilion)
Meet our following Solution Experts in our booth to get insights on how to successfully implement Oracle New Economy and Edge solutions.
Oracle Siebel CRM and MDM
Oracle ERP R12 Upgrade and Implementations
Oracle Edge Applications : Demantra, Transportation Mgt & Agile PLM
Oracle Business Intelligence : Oracle BI Apps, Hyperion & OBIEE
Data Quality Assessments and Management
Come Learn business secrets from our experts. They will discuss best practices, share client success stories, and innovative solutions.

Register to attend our business sessions and come collect your free Sierra Atlantic give-away from our booth on registration.Visit www.SierraAtlantic.com/middle-east/ to know more about our Middle East Service Offerings

Oracle New Economy Applications Services
›Service Offerings
›E-Business Suite Services
›Oracle R12 Upgrade Services
›Oracle Application Management Services
›Agile PLM Services
›Business Intelligence Services
›BI Applications Implementation Services
Oracle Edge Applications Services
›Oracle Siebel CRM Services
›Oracle Siebel MDM Services
›Hyperion Planning & Budgeting Services
›Demantra Application Services
›Oracle Transportation Management Services
›Data Quality Management Services

Best Regards

Dinesh C

Oracle Open World 2010: Whats in for you and Me

Dears,

The takeaway message from OOW 2010 is “Oracle Continues to Demonstrate Benefits from an Effective M&A Strategy”. A continued stream of product enhancements and releases may be one cause for the positive sentiment. Delivery of Fusion Apps by Q1 2011 may also have lifted any previous negative sentiment from last year feedback polls. Additional feature and product release highlights from Oracle Open World 2010 include:

CRM On Demand Release 18 gains integrated sales and marketing. The latest release focuses on features that bridge marketing processes to sales. For example, key data integration tools for customer data improve the quality of common profiles for both customers and prospects. Campaign automation tools allow marketers to launch 1:1 marketing and lights-out campaigns across multi-channel and multi-stage campaigns using visual business process Analytics take advantage of the Hyperion multi-dimensional warehouse to integrate business intelligence between sales and marketing. Response management capabilities create personalized landing pages, web forms, and microsites. Meanwhile, Partner Relationship Management (PRM) enhancements include improved deal registration and capabilities to capture partner enablement. The improved Insurance Edition adds a Producer Success Model and expands the broker demographic profiles. Adaptive planning streamlines business planning and delivers trend analysis across multiple time periods for simulation and comparison.POV: The new release plugs a significant hole in covering prospecting to lead management to closed revenue business processes. However, buyers comparing best of breed marketing automation solutions such as Market2Lead, Marketo, and Unica will find that major functionality gaps still exists. Despite the gap, those customers seeking an On Demand integrated sales and marketing suite will find that Release 18 sets the stage for a level of integration often lacking in best of breed suites and Salesforce.com. Business benefits include a unified revenue pipeline that will improve close rates and reduces sales and marketing costs. More importantly, those customers on Release 18 gain an easier migration path to the Fusion CRM applications arriving in January 2011. Customers seeking Social CRM features will have to wait for future releases or go to competitor products.

JD Edwards Enterprise One customers gain key adapter to Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics.

With Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.6.2, Enterprise One customers can integrate to Oracle’s Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics. Key features include the ability to assess inventory levels, predict backlogs, identify potential product fulfillment needs, improve accounts receivable (A/R) and daily sales outstanding (DSO) issues.POV: Improved insight into order and inventory data will allow organizations to improve inventory management, order fulfillment, and reduce collection times. This new adapter continues Oracle’s strategy to embed Oracle Business Intelligence Apps into the core JD Edwards product. Financial analytics have already been delivered. Buyers can expect Manufacturing Analytics, Procurement and Spend Analytics, and Projects Analytics to arrive in future releases. In general, customers will find the analytical capabilities a significant improvement over existing JD Edwards offerings.
Apps Unlimited announcements show continued investment in R&D.

PeopleSoft customers gain a visual company directory through PeopleSoft Enterprise Company Directory 9.1 and an upgraded PeopleSoft PeopleTools 8.51 with a new PeopleSoft Test Framework that provides contextual menus and menu inclusion of user search results. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management 8 release delivers full web enablement, OBIEE integration, and a new governance platform. Oracle BI Applications Release 7.9.6.2 adds full localization and translation to 28 supported languages, integration with Informatica PowerCenter 8.6.1 HF11 for ET and support for IBM DB2 9.1, 9.5 and 9.7; Microsoft SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008; and Teradata v12 and 13.POV: Despite the big shift in R&D resources towards the Fusion Apps teams, Oracle keeps up its promise to deliver customer requested features. Larry’s strategy appears to provide a greater synergy and return on R&D investments when compared to other competitors. However, customers must continue to hold Oracle accountable to investments in the short-term and long-term Apps Unlimited product road maps. In fact, objective analysis on Oracle’s R&D investments by many influencers including Martijn Linssen show Oracle with the least relative investment in R&D when compared to competitors such as IBM and SAP. Oracle could be the most efficient, but over the long haul, Oracle will have to invest more or explain why the organization is more efficient. At the end of the day, customers want to know how much of their maintenance dollars go back to their product.
· Industry Global Business Unit (GBU) announcements focus on key regulatory requirements. Oracle Health Management Platform brings providers and payors together with key features such as Thin Electronic Health Records, member enrollment and relationship management, medications reconciliation, patient discharge management, provider referral analysis, patient outreach and relationship management, and chronic disease management. Oracle Financial Services Software brings Oracle Mantas Energy and Commodity Trading Compliance (ECTC) to meet trade surveillance requirements from agencies such as the CFTC, FERC and FSA. A partnership with CACI helps add compliance with federal mandates such as the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS)to the Oracle Contract Lifecycle Management for Public Sector product. On the Insurance Industry front, Oracle added Oracle Insurance Insight 7.0, an insurance-specific business intelligence solution; and Oracle Documaker Release 12, a solution for creating and managing complex insurance documents.POV: Oracle’s vertical play targets high margin service based industries including Communications, Education and Research, Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Life Sciences, Public Sector, and Retail. Recent releases and enhancements highlight the economies of scale strategy to win over heavily regulated industries. Oracle’s treasure trove of horizontal components will continue to provide its Industry GBU’s with new features freeing up vertical teams to concentrate on the ever-changing regulatory environment. Of note, the CACI deal in Public Sector Contract Lifecycle Management signals Oracle’s willingness to deploy a vertical partner strategy to build out areas of expertise.

Oracle continues investment in Java. Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) expands support for new scripting languages and reaffirms support for Open JDK for JDK 7 and JDK 8. Oracle plans to bring many of the JavaFX features back into the Client to include the latest multi-media standads support including HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS Web. Oracle plans to invest more into Java on Devices that support small-footprint CPU-efficient capabilities that support new devices such as cards, phones and TVs, and consistent tooling and emulation across hardware platforms.Point of View (POV): Cynics may believe that Oracle will corrupt the openness of Java going forward and hinder the common agenda. However, the investments in improving mobile, multi-media usage, and consumer devices reflect the broader adoption trends expected in the industry. Skeptics should stay vigilant with efforts and energies focused 3 years from now, especially when the scrutiny naturally fades over time. More importantly, users should keep the free standard edition features rich applying the 80/20 rule for what paid features show up in Enterprise Edition versus the Standard Edition.

The Bottom Line for Users – Oracle’s Red Stack Strategy Will Provide This Generation’s Challenge to IBM Blue Stack
Larry Ellison’s strategy appears to recreate IBM’s 1970′s approach at securing the largest share of the business technology budget By providing a silicon to vertical app stack, customers gain not only high levels of integration, but also potential long term lock-in. Expect Die Hard Red Stack Believers and Net New Greenfield customers to buy-in to this approach. However, the bulk of Oracle’s customer base comprises of Best of Breed Customers By Accident. Many of these customers run software with a large IBM Blue Stack footprint. As a result, these customers must determine how to balance their portfolio with: Apps Unlimited in the short term; SaaS best of breed plays and Fusion Apps component adoption in the mid-term; and replacement with Oracle Fusion Apps or other technology stacks such as SAP, Salesforce.com, and Workday in the long-term. Most customers expect to optimize for business technology value while leaving enough leverage to preserve choice and flexibility. Customers must make strategic platform decisions on both on-premises and cloud stacks for packaged apps and custom apps in the next 24 months or face a broken or strained apps strategy.

Your P&C

DC*

NexGen Intelligence CRM ( I*CRM )

Dears,
With competition on the rise and customers getting more demanding, a 360-degree view of the customer is not, in itself, sufficient to manage customer relationships. The need of the hour is a comprehensive sphere of customer intelligence that draws from many data sources: billing systems, mediation systems, channel partners, analyst reports and social networks, to name a few.
Enterprises expend considerable effort to understand their customers and provide a superior experience and enhanced services to them, but still they see an enormous difference between their understanding of customers' requirements and their customers' actual expectations.
This difference might be due to targeting the wrong customers, failing to understand their real requirements, lacking a convincing value proposition, or selecting the wrong channel for communication. The premise of this article is to handle these challenges with the help of a new framework that utilizes customer information and leverages suitable statistical models to help the decision support system to derive accurate customer intelligence.
This 'Intelligence CRM' framework will help customer-facing functions in effective decision support in order to improve the effectiveness of sales, marketing and service functions across the enterprise, thereby resulting in improved customer satisfaction and retention.

Are Your Customer Interactions Being Guided by Intelligence?
Two important aspects of customer intelligence are "need" and "buying potential." The former deals with what the customer might buy and the latter with what the customer can potentially buy. Enterprises should understand their customers first, which means figuring out what products/services are important to them and the actual value they perceive in these products/services. This customer data, if properly leveraged, can derive the necessary intelligence to help in understanding critical customer attributes -- various aspects of customer behavior, customer buying potential, and customer lifetime value -- thereby helping to increase the success rate of sales deals as well as order sizes.
This approach will be much more accurate and effective than the conventional practice, because it is based on customer-related intelligence rather than just customer-related data. As an example, a customer might have indicated phone as the preferred communication channel, but an analysis of interaction and response history shows this customer responded effectively only to email communications. This intelligence can be leveraged to accurately identify the right communication channel with the customer, thus increasing the success rate of future interactions.
A CRM system should not only be operationally efficient, but also provide the much-needed intelligence, which we call "Intelligence CRM" or "ICRM." The key building blocks of this system are problem identification, customer data capture, data collation, data mining, data analysis and modeling. With increased global competition, varied product and service offerings from enterprises, and changing customer preferences, the need for ICRM will only increase.

Unearth the Hidden Information
Customer data collected by enterprises at various customer touch points -- such as customer acquisition, order capture, billing, Web self-service, channel partners, or service request management -- is maintained in several customer facing/customer operations supporting systems. This data should be reconciled and refined by performing appropriate basic-to-complex data analysis in order to unearth relevant insights about the customer. Imagine a CRM system that can provide meaningful insights about a customer's propensity to churn or to buy a service/product offering -- or reveal what that customer really values. In essence, we would need an "Intelligence CRM" system to provide this insight.

ICRM and Its Application
ICRM is a framework to derive intelligence and insights to address specific business challenges by applying configurable decision support models on data from multiple data sources spanning across the enterprise and beyond.
Traditionally, this approach has been leveraged on information available in CRM systems alone, thus limiting the quality of the intelligence/insight thus gained. This might not be sufficient for the business to handle its challenges. With competition on the rise and customers getting more demanding, a 360-degree view is not sufficient to manage customers. What businesses need today is a comprehensive "sphere of customer intelligence" gained from sources that go beyond CRM systems and the enterprise -- that is, information from various sources such as billing systems, mediation systems, channel partners, analyst reports, social networking sites, etc.
ICRM leverages a three-layered structure to gain this intelligence: the data layer, the intelligence layer and the usage layer, along with a modeling layer that cuts across all three.
The data layer is comprised of an enterprise-level online analytical processing (OLAP) system that gathers relevant information about the customer from various data sources and converts it into structured data.
The intelligence layer, which resides above the data layer, leverages business intelligence tools like real-time decision and provides the first level of intelligence on customer attributes based on the criteria defined by the modeling layer.
The usage layer is the ICRM application layer, which is an empowered CRM application that pulls out information from the intelligence layer and provides the necessary insights to the business during customer interaction and decision support.
The modeling layer, which supports the other three layers, is the most critical layer. The modeling layer provides inputs to the data layer (enterprise OLAP) on the type of schema and attributes that are to be stored and takes the sample data for building models.
Technology and User Adoption
Any good business intelligence tool with a real-time decision system can help in building an effective decision-support system. However, there is no single system today that provides comprehensive insights on the business aspects by taking into consideration the individual insights from the respective sources discussed above.
This requires redefining the information architecture within an enterprise and going beyond the CRM system to leverage the customer information that resides in disparate systems across the enterprise, in order to gain more meaningful insights with greater accuracy and relevance.
The ICRM architecture helps achieve this business need. Within the ICRM solution architecture, the ICRM system integrates with other legacy systems, external entities, decision support/intelligence tools, and the Enterprise OLAP.
Customer-related information should be passed on to the Enterprise OLAP through the CRM system, which has the provision to capture data from external entities that are the end-customer touchpoints, like channel partners, OEM partners, points of sale and so on.
Any customer-related data stored in the legacy application databases is also passed to the enterprise OLAP. The enterprise OLAP structure is built so that data from several sources is collected in a structured format, as defined by modeling tools and intelligence tools.
Intelligence tools take logic and structure from modeling tools, as well as the data in a structured format from the Enterprise OLAP, and build and pass on the required insights -- like churn prediction value or propensity to buy -- to the ICRM system.
Precious Gems
Customer insights are hidden in the form of data scattered across the enterprise in several source systems. A proper mechanism in the form of an "ICRM framework" devised to collect and process this information will derive valuable insights from it.

This is the "intelligence" that is required from a CRM system, which will help empower enterprises to interact with and serve their customers in a better-informed manner, building lasting and fruitful customer relationships

Your Partner and Companion
DC*

The New Customer Relationship Therapy: Doctoring Customer Dynamics

Dears,
Too often, businesses view their interactions with customers as distinct transactions. What may have been a frustrating and confusing series of calls and messages for a customer may be interpreted by the company as a series of successful communications. The emerging theory of Customer Dynamics looks at the overall relationship with a customer across all channels.
The relationship between a business and its customers is determined by the interchanges that occur between them. These interactions are complex. They occur over a wide range of communication channels, such as phone, email, Web and text, including some outside of organizational control like social media. They cover a broad range of topics and are somewhat spontaneous in nature. Companies devote large sums of their budget toward providing a satisfying experience for their customers when they contact them. Given this focus and monetary commitment, why do the results often fail to measure up to expectations?
The problem is most businesses view their interactions with customers as distinct transactions. However, customers do not look at them this way; they view their relationship with a business as just that, a relationship, not individual interactions. What if businesses could go beyond what is just transacted with their customers when evaluating the quality of the service they provide and look at the overall relationship with a customer across all channels? What if by doing this they could incorporate a customer's feelings, wants and needs into the equation?
New Approach
Customer Dynamics, an emerging theory on customer-business relationships, does that. This theory looks at the relationships between organizations and customers from an interpersonal viewpoint. It goes beyond the transactional nature of the interaction to look at emotions, intent and desires. It views interactions as a chain of events rather than single point occurrences.
Intent is the engine that powers Customer Dynamics, on the business' side as well as the customers'. Customers contact an organization with a purpose -- to resolve a billing issue, overcome a problem or explore changing their service, for example. Organizations also bring intent into the equation. They are likely to want to manage their bottom line, outmaneuver the competition and secure long-term revenue growth.
From the customer side, intent is what initiates the interaction and serves as a gauge for success. From the organization side, it controls the flow and ultimately the outcome. These intents are not necessarily conflicting, but there may be conflict when a business fails to understand the nature of its customers' intent.
For example, Maritza visits the Web site of her mobile phone provider to add a text messaging plan to her service. She successfully completes the transaction and receives an email message confirming the change. Unsure when the change actually goes into effect, she replies to the email asking for clarification. Not receiving a response, she then phones customer service to follow up and is told the changes take effect on the next business day.
Each of these interactions would probably be seen as complete and successful from the provider's viewpoint. However, when looked at together it is clear that miscommunication occurred between User and the business. Regardless of where the actual fault resides, Maritza had to contact the company two additional times after her Web transaction. This serves as a cause of frustration for her, and results in additional service-related expenses for the business.
More Than a Transaction
So, how does an organization understand and methodically leverage Customer Dynamics to impact business performance?

Optimizing Customer Dynamics requires organizations to go beyond the transactional nature of its customer interactions. To look at the unstructured information within them -- for example, what was said (or typed) -- to identify clues about emotions, desires and other difficult to quantify aspects. There are three primary steps in this process.
First organizations must capture all customer interactions across every contact channel in order to have sufficient information to correctly gauge customer intent. Then those interactions need to be analyzed to extract useful insight. Due to the sheer volume of interactions this analysis needs to be automated. It also must take into account any correlation between customer contacts occurring within different channels in order to create a complete picture of that customer relationship. Finally, for change to occur, the business must take action based on these insights, in a way that creates impact in terms of improving both the customer experience and the business.
A forth step is also possible, utilizing technology to impact customer interactions in real time as they occur. This can be performed in a variety of ways. Prompting agents on next-best-actions based on what transpires during customer contacts and in the context of recent behaviors, or intelligent routing of a customer based on their intent as ascertained from recent contacts.
Top-Line Results
Businesses that embrace Customer Dynamics are positioned for rapid maturation of their organizations. The resultant value delivered to the business can be substantial due to the potential for impact across a wide range of operational areas, including basic to transformative initiatives.
At the base level, organizations need to ensure compliance with regulations and mitigate other risks to their business. Incorporating the full range of customer interactions into this process widens the scope of view, and automated analysis allows for the redistribution of resources to more valued-added endeavors.
Another basic operational imperative is efficiency. Understanding why customers look to a particular contact channel to conduct certain transactions assists the business in better directing contacts to high-efficiency channels, and then monitoring the customers' success to make sure the outcome is satisfactory. Improving efficiency also frees resources for other use.
Resources made available through compliance automation and increased operational efficiency can be put to use in creating competitive differentiation and improving top-line performance. Capturing and understanding intent -- of both the customer and organization -- enables the business to provide services and products that its customers value and make sure its operational processes align with those goals.
Perhaps the most intuitive benefit of Customer Dynamics comes from its ability to boost revenues, and correspondingly top-line financial results. Identifying common desires, understanding concerns and capturing best-practice approaches transforms the relationship to one of mutual benefit

Your Partner and Companion
DC*

How not to execute a Siebel CRM Project: You’r Disaster Recovery Recipe (Part 2)

Dears,
***This is the concluding part of my earlier blog article***

6 Ability to differentiate CRM Projects

A Siebel application is usually intended to be used by one of the following groups:

• Users selling high value products to a relatively small number of customers.
• Users dealing with low value, high volume sales and/or service type transactions.

A particularly common mistake resulting from a lack of Siebel expertise is the failure
to recognize the significant difference between these two types of project. Low value, high volume sales and service environments are typically very transactional with emphasis on users gathering set pieces of information in a set sequence, and the style of user interface built needs to reflect this.
By contrast, the nature of transactions in a high value, low volume scenario means that processes are typically quite unstructured, with skeletal information about new opportunities being fleshed out throughout the sales process. It is therefore difficult to predict the sequence in which users will navigate through Siebel and enter information, and again the user interface must reflect this.

Furthermore, high value, low volume sales users can effectively boycott the application if they do not like it – organisations do not fire their top performing salespeople simply because they will not use Siebel. Additionally in this situation, increased management control is often a key stated objective of the Siebel project. However, if this is the sole objective of the project then end users may feel that the system’s only impact on their day-to-day activities will be a negative one. Consequently, user adoption will be poor and the project will fail.

The key is to encourage user adoption by offering genuine benefits for the sales force, such as the provision of up to date competitor analysis, or automatic generation of presentations, proposals and quotations. An application that is well designed for one type of scenario rarely suits the other.
Misunderstanding the user types and consequently not designing the user interface correctly is an expensive mistake to rectify later, not only in terms of build cost but also in terms of lost user confidence when an inappropriate application is deployed.


7 Lack of sufficient knowledge in development team

Configuring Siebel quickly and efficiently is not an impossible challenge but it is a specialist
job. Whereas with many programming languages an expert might work two or even three times as fast as an average programmer, with Siebel development the factor is much bigger, maybe as large as 20. A development team with an inadequate skill set risks delivering any of the following:

• An application that does not meet users’ requirements because the people performing the configuration do not know what is possible or how to implement it.
• An application that was expensive to develop because it contains more configuration than necessary to achieve a given task, in particular extensive coding to implement something that could have been handled far more easily in Siebel Tools if the developer had had the relevant knowledge.
• Following on from the previous point, an application that is difficult and costly to support, enhance and upgrade.

8 Insufficient or inappropriate testing

It is not necessary to spend an excessive amount of time checking the standard features
of the packaged Siebel application, which can usually be assumed to work correctly.
Pre-deployment testing must instead focus on the specific configuration that has been carried out to meet the organization’s particular requirements. Ensuring that the application supports the business processes as intended, and that processes run correctly across multiple applications, is also vital. The trick is to use the limited time period available for testing in the most effective
way possible, concentrating on the areas of highest risk and/or those with the most impact if
there is a problem. This usually means focusing on the following:

• Do the processes, as defined in the workshops, work as anticipated? If a good job has been done of involving users through the design and development process, this should not normally be a major area of concern.
• Are any exceptions to those processes supported?
• Do integrations work between applications?
• Is all the master data, e.g. list of values, correct? Do the initial data loads import all the data correctly?
• Will the application work correctly in the production environment? For example, the development environment might sit on a single LAN, but multiple firewalls might be involved in the production environments that require opening of ports and other infrastructure changes.
• Do any specialist modules, e.g. Siebel Remote, work as expected?
• Will the application work with production volumes? As it can be very difficult to replicate production usage scenarios, careful thought ought to be given to whether this style of testing is necessary and practical and, if so, what scenarios will be simulated.

Test plans are also advisable to ensure a degree of repeatability, although these should be as brief as possible to keep the emphasis on high quality testing, not on the maintenance of test plans.


9 Poor user adoptions

It is not uncommon to come across Siebel implementations that are, in the main, technically sound and well aligned to user requirements, but are poorly adopted because the users do not understand how to take advantage of the facilities offered. This lack of knowledge can and does occur
at multiple levels:

• Not knowing how to perform basic navigation, search and data entry: for example, taking multiple actions to achieve something that can actually be done with a couple of button clicks.

· One of the main causes of this is poor training. The training provided may simply be insufficient, or it may be inadequate in that it only covers the mechanics rather than the procedures specific to the organization. Training that is not delivered very close to the point of system deployment, or training that does not reflect a person’s prior technical experience, will also not yield the best results. For example, it would not be appropriate to use the same training material for a field sales person who has previously hardly used a computer, and a technically literate power user. However, both of these users still have training needs. Surprisingly often, projects get as far as the end user training and deployment stage before it is discovered that the detailed procedures for using the system have not been fully agreed and documented. This lack of clarity is another reason why users do not use the system that has been developed. The normal cause of this is insufficient user involvement throughout the project and it is often one manifestation of more deep seated problems in an implementation. To avoid delivering a system which users cannot use to its full potential, it is essential to thoroughly plan the way in which the application will be used, and to provide adequate training to users across the organization.

10 Inadequate reporting

When designing and configuring a Siebel application, it is easy to focus entirely on the entry of data, and how that data should be transferred to other applications by integration. However, in most implementations, a key requirement is to extract data from the application and put it in a form that
managers at all levels can use to make decisions. In other words, the application must have the capability to report on and analyze information held in the database. Oracle provides a number of reporting and analysis tools including Siebel Reports (Actuate), Oracle BI Publisher and Oracle
Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Siebel Analytics). The most suitable tool depends on the situation, and it is often appropriate to meet multiple requirements with multiple technologies.
It is essential to consider reporting at the start of a project, to ensure that the information captured suits the reporting requirements, and to ensure that reporting and analysis are delivered either in parallel with, or very shortly after, the main Siebel releases. If any of these steps are omitted,
an otherwise excellent Siebel implementation can elicit a reaction of “so what?” from the business community.

Common Theme : Product Excellence

The majority of the problems outlined here are underpinned by a common theme. If the project team does not understand Siebel well enough from a functional and/or technical perspective then it is very unlikely that the system will be well aligned to users’ needs, of reasonable technical quality and cheap to create.

Product knowledge cannot be measured in years of experience. It is quite possible for an individual to have worked with Siebel for several years without actually having learnt a great deal about the product. In fact, true product knowledge encompasses three key things:

• A thorough understanding of what the core product does and how that can be applied to particular business situations.
• A deep comprehension of the principles behind how the product is built. It is not possible to hold the entirety of such a vast product inside one person’s head, but it is perfectly possible to have a firm enough understanding of the underlying technologies to allow any new functional area to be learnt very quickly.

An understanding of how to gently bend the core product to any given business situation and, in particular, which of the multitude of available configuration techniques is most applicable in which situation. Projects may have effective team members who have either a strong functional or technical emphasis in their skill set, but a truly worthwhile team member will have knowledge about both dimensions.

In our experience, the most successful Siebel projects have a small team of experts who can both speak to users about requirements and effectively configure Siebel to meet those requirements. The value of real product knowledge (as opposed to certificates or years of poor quality experience) cannot be overestimated.


In conclusion
A Siebel project has the potential to increase an organization’s sales, improve customer service and reduce internal costs. However, without adequate effort, planning and expertise, the project can run into a number of problems, and ultimately fail to deliver on expectations.
“To achieve success, it is essential that your project team is equipped with the skills and resources, both internal and external, that they need to maximize the benefits of this powerful software suite.”

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