What’s New in Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v? End to End Integration Capabilities

Dears,

This is my concluding article on Oracle Customer Hub V8.2 enhanced features, this section we would explore briefly the end to end integration capabilities of OCH.

Oracle OCH 8.2 is delivered with pre-built standards compliant and cross-industry-interoperable integration processes with Siebel CRM, Oracle Ebusiness Suite, SAP and Oracle Billing & Revenue Management to acquire customer data and share master data. There are 2 types of flows that are supported with this pre integrated solution:

The Push Mode
In this mode of operation, the participating applications act passively where they send new or updated customer information to the hub for cleansing, deduplication and enrichment. The hub then in turn publishes the cleansed golden version to all the participating applications.
The push mode flows are asynchronous. This mode of operation is non-intrusive with respect to the need to change the source and target applications. They do not assume that the hub is the data master, thereby ensuring that the authoring can be decentralized. Because of the non-intrusive character of this architecture, “push mode” MDM implementations can lead to faster MDM project delivery.

Pull Mode
In this mode of operation, Siebel CRM and Oracle EBS (and possibly other applications using composite UI) interact with the hub in real time by executing synchronous integration processes at the time of data entry
The Pull mode processes are synchronous and enable a real-time interaction between Siebel CRM, Oracle EBS and OCH. Through these processes the consuming applications have On-Demand access to the source of truth for customer data and hence allow duplicate data prevention and capture of the right data at the time of entry The key enhancements with OCH 8.2 related to prebuilt integration capability include

* Web Services Library
*Support for latest versions of Siebel, Ebusiness Suite, SAP and BRM
*Integration Process Interoperability


Web Services Library OCH 8.2 has been enhanced to include more than 20 additional composite and granular web services. These services provide a handle to expose day to day operational and analytical functionality used by Data Steward in form of web services. Customer‟s preferable user interface applications can consume these services to expose this functionality. Out of the box Oracle used ADF based application Data Governance Manager consumed following web services.

Master Service

Following services are added in OCH 8.2 to expose master section functionality covered under Data Governance Manager.
* Get Master Entities Count
*Get Master Organization Details
*Get Master Person Details

Consolidate Service

These services provide reports on exiting batches and help report records gone in exception patch. We can leverage these services to make corrections and re-run the batches Following services are added in OCH 8.2 to expose consolidate section functionality covered under Data Governance Manager.

*Get Batch Process Report
* Get Specific Batch Report
* Get Completed Records Batch Report
* Get Organization Rejected Records Detail Report
* getPerRejectRecordsDetailReport
* updateOrgBatchRejectedRecords
* updatePerBatchRejectedRecords

ConsolidateListImportService
These services are very extensively used by consolidate module of DGM to kick of new import jobs. Following services are added in OCH 8.2 to expose list import functionality over web service,
* obtainTemplateList
* submitNewImport

CleanseCompletenessService
These services help bad sources of data in the enterprise, and pull the records which are non complaint with the completeness matrix defined. Following services are added in OCH 8.2 to expose cleanse section functionality covered under Data Governance Manager.
* Get Hub Complete Compliance Info
* Get Hub Organization Incomplete Detail
* Get Hub Per Incomplete Detail
* Get Source Complete Compliance Info
* Get Source Organization Incomplete Detail
* Get Source Per Incomplete Detail

ShareService
This service helps get the real-time information about the share module functionality.
* Get Share Information

SystemsRegistrationService
This services helps get number of systems registered to OCH
* Get Systems Registration Info

GovernService
This service helps pull work queue information of Data Steward from OCH
* Get Organization Suspect Records
* Get Person Suspect Records
* Remove Pending Record
* Submit Merge Request Organization Record
* Submit Merge Request Person Record

Request Merge Services
These services can request merge on two selected records over the integration layer
* Organizations
* Persons

Siebel 8.1.1, EBS R 12, SAP and BRM Integration and Certification
Siebel 8.1.1, EBS R 12, SAP and BRM Integration and Certification Prior to OCH 8.2, the participating applications included Siebel CRM 8.0 and Oracle Ebusiness Suite 11.5. In OCH 8.2, the latest versions of the participating applications (Siebel CRM 8.1.1 and Oracle Ebusiness Suite R 12) are supported. Prior to OCH 8.2, the pre-integrated solution included only Siebel CRM and Oracle Ebusiness Suite. With OCH 8.2, additional applications are also integrated out of the box. The additional applications include Oracle BRM 7.4 and SAP ECC.

Interoperability with Communications Industry PIPs

The Customer master data management integration processes now are interoperable with Communications Industry integration processes supporting the following 2 scenarios:

· Customer Creates: When a Customer Data is created in CRM as part of an Order it automatically triggers a Sync flow that will publish the data to the Oracle Customer Hub. The Oracle Customer Hub will process the data by cleansing it, matching to existing data, and if match is found linking it and updating the golden record of the customer. OCH will then publish back to CRM the updated data and publish to subscribing applications. In the meantime on the CRM side the CSR will complete the Sales Order and submit it trough the AIACOM Order to Bill flow with a reference to the Customer Data. The Sync Customer step will perform a Cross-reference check and identify that the Customer Data is new and needs to be created in BRM. The new customer data will be queried from CRM and used to create the Customer Data in BRM. The Oracle Product Hub will publish in batch mode to BRM the updates that were applied to the Customer Data. The BRM connector will perform a Cross-reference check. If the cross-reference is found, then the updates will be applied to BRM. If the Cross reference is not found then they will be discarded.


· Customer Updates (Account and Contact): When a CSR updates Account Data in CRM this automatically triggers a Sync Customer flow that will publish the data to the Oracle Customer Hub (as part of the Customer MDM flow) and to Oracle BRM (as part of the AIACOM Agent Assisted Billing Care flow). OCH will process the data and do the usual cleanse, match, and link and update and publish the updated data as response back to CRM and as sync to subscribing applications. AIACOM Agent Assisted Billing Care flow will check if a BRM Cross Reference exists for the updated account data and if so it will update the account in Oracle BRM. The Oracle Product Hub will publish in batch mode to BRM the updates that were applied to the Customer Data. The BRM connector will perform a Cross-reference check. If the cross-reference is found, then the updates will be applied to BRM. If the Cross reference is not found then they will be discarded as the customer does not exist in BRM and thus is a prospect
· Contact Level Update of Customer Data: Oracle BRM only provides services to update a Contact in the context of an Account. When OCH publishes a Sync Contact it needs be transformed into a Sync Account message so that it can be processed by the BRM services. Compared to the previous flow, the flow described in this slide has an additional transformations step that will convert the Sync Contact Message into a Sync Account message, so that the Contact can be updated in the context of the Account.

SOA Governance Tools Integration solution is delivered on Oracle‟s leading fusion middleware which contains following SOA governance capabilities.

Artifact Generator: The Artifacts Generator is a development tool that can help jumpstart your Oracle AIA development by auto generating much of the common code needed to create Oracle AIA application business connector (ABC) service implementations. The Artifacts Generator is a command line Apache Ant tool that uses the Free Marker template engine to generate complete and compliable ABC service implementations in BPEL.
PIP Auditor: The Process Integration Pack (PIP) Auditor verifies that a PIP‟s design and development adheres to Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) guidelines. The PIP Auditor contains a number of tests that check for different standards mandated or recommended by Oracle AIA with respect to PIP design and development. The PIP Auditor generates high-level HTML and detailed XML reports that provide information about violations to the mentioned standards
XMAN: The XSLT Mapping Analyzer is a tool you can use to generate the mapping information from the application business connector (ABC) service transformation XSL into HTML.

Thats all for now till I explore more about Oracle Customer Hub, Thanks to Oracle Corporation for such a wonderful product and release documents related to this application.

Thanks for exploring along with me

Your P&C

DC*

What’s New in Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v? Part 3: End to End Data Quality Enhancements

Dears,

Lets see the E2E Data quality features that are available with OCH 8.2 V.

OCH End to End Data Quality
Oracle Customer Hub provides best in class data quality capabilities with a complete offer covering profiling, address validation, parsing and standardization and deduplication (including an ability to support multimode –real time and batch-, multi address, multi languages, multi source systems and more generally multi criteria matching rules), as well as a data decay engine.
Oracle Data Quality provides a framework enabling a controlled path to higher data quality levels for the hub as well as the entire enterprise Data quality rules are defined declaratively in the Rules Manager and executed against the source systems‟ inputs in the Rules Execution Engine (aka Workbench) to profile / analyze the data with pre-defined metrics, cleanse and standardize the data including the validation and potentially the correction of invalid addresses, match and deduplicate duplicated records and finally enrich the data from 3rd party systems. The objective of this framework is to load the target system with zero rejects and a clean customer data set.
The exception management layer’s goal is to provide a framework to both automatically or manually fix the incorrect data not only in the target CRM/MDM system but also in the sources and hence enhance data quality for the enterprise. Data quality levels can be gradually increased / adjusted as a function of the capacity of the exception management process and the time at hand to fix the data given project constraints.

Integrated Cleansing
Oracle Data Quality Address Validation Server provides capabilities to parse, standardize, transliterate, deduplicate and validate all address data, resulting in improved address data quality, which in turn would help enterprise in integrating international customer information, preventing against identity loss, and assisting in fraud detection and prevention, as well as directly reducing mail based marketing costs. Oracle Data Cleansing Server performs validation of address data against published standards and directories by utilizing reference data. As postal codes change in different countries due to settlements, system changes or name changes, reference tables for each country can also be updated on a monthly, quarterly or biannual basis. Oracle leverages arrangements with leading postal reference data provider to enable customers to receive the updates on a periodical basis. These reference tables are provided in a separate, platform-independent database making it easily updateable at any time.

Enhanced Matching
Oracle Data Quality Matching Server performs high-quality search, match, duplicate identification, and relationship linking on all types of name, address and identification data.

The highlights of the Oracle Data quality Matching server include:

* Multi-Mode support

Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides the capability to use different set of match rules depending on the mode of operation. For example, it allows one set of match rules to be applicable for data getting in through Real time mode and a different set of match rules for data getting in through the batch mode.

* Multi-Source support

Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides the capability to use different set of match rules depending on the Source from where the data is coming from. For example, it allows one set of match rules to be applicable for data getting in from a CRM system and a different set of match rules for data getting in from EBIZ system.

* Multi-Attribute support

Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides high quality search & matching on all types of name, address and identification data like:
o Person Names
o Organization Names
o Address elements
o Dates
o Telephone numbers
o Product Names
o Social Security/Drivers License/Passport Numbers etc.

The attributes/fields that are used for matching can easily be modified by changing the match fields in the system definition file. Also depending on the Business Requirement, different weighs can be given to different match fields.


* Multiple Address matching support Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides the capability to consider all the addresses associated with the parent entity (Account or Contact) for matching as against using only the primary address for matching.

* Multi-Language support Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides the capability to use different set of match rules depending on the Language or the Country of the record. This feature can be used by the Customers with multi geographical implementations where there will be the need to use different Search Criteria/Match Rules for records with different Languages/Countries. For example, a Contact with name „William‟ will match to a Contact with name „bob‟ when the country of the record is USA, but when the country of the record is India, „William‟ will not match to „Bob‟

* Multi Criteria (Rules Based) It includes an easy to use administration console which enables enterprise to create new match rules or edit existing match rules for their specific scenarios, or to extend matching to additional languages and/or locales. Oracle Data Quality Matching Server delivers industry leading global coverage with language/locale specific matching libraries for 52 languages/locales

* Support for highly flexible search strategies The solution includes highly-flexible search strategies, which can be selected based on the data being searched for, the level of risk and the need that the search must satisfy, allowing users to balance performance and comprehensiveness of search/match. There are multiple Search strategies like Extreme, Exhaustive, Typical, Narrow, and Custom that are available out of the box.

* Smart indexing to cut through error and variation in identity data, including multi-country, multi-language information. Using smart indexing and key building, Oracle Data Quality Matching Server cuts through error and variation (including spelling, phonetic, transliteration and multi-country data errors, as well as any missing or out-of-order words and other variations), to help enterprise discover duplicates and establish relationship both in real time and batch. There are multiple indexing strategies like Standard, Limited, Extended that are available out of the box.

* Support for Incremental Data Load
Oracle Data Quality Matching Server provides the capability to load and index the data incrementally rather than loading and indexing millions of data in one go. This will simplify the deployment of the solution.
Data Decay Management
Data decay refers to the way in which managed information becomes degraded or obsolete or stale over time. OCH 8.2 provides data decay dashboards to monitor and fix the data decay of Account and Contact records. These dashboards are accessed through the OCH administration screens. The below Data Decay chart shows number of Account in the hub with respect to corresponding Data Decay Indicator (DDI) value. DDI is an integer variable we use to track how stale is field values in our system. DDI values range from 0 to 100. 100 is the most up to date field and 0 is decayed field value. Every field which is tracked for Data decay resets the value of DDI to 100. Algorithm to reduce the DDI over period of time very configurable and can be tailed to customer needs on how quickly or slowly we want to make field values as stale.
OCH Data Decay management consists of the following key components:
* Decay Detection: Captures updates on the monitored attributes / relationships of a record and sets the decay metrics at the attribute level granularity or relationship level granularity.
* Decay Metrics Re-Calculation - Process to retrieve Decay Metrics for the monitored attributes/relationships of a record, use a set of predefined rules to calculate the new metrics value and update the metrics.
* Decay Correctness - Identifies stale data based on certain criteria and triggers a pre-defined action. Data decay monitors can be configured on column and records level. And can trigger actions based on some pre set criteria for example we can make a rule that when data is decay indicator for consumer address field reaches 80 then we automatically trigger enrichment call to Acxiom to get the latest information about the consumer address.
* Decay Report - generates Decay Metrics charts on a periodic basis
* Data decay dashboards enables the users to fix the right data at the right time thereby minimizing the cost of correction and enrichment of data.
Oracle data quality solution has a proven track record in terms of scalability and performance, handling large volume, highly-scalable, critical applications. The key enablers include
• Enhanced connector with Session Pool Management
· Enhanced index management that enables faster synchronization and incremental load support. · It is a highly-scalable solution with proven performance on systems with billions index entries on one database and millions real-time transactions in an hour.

Hope this is useful and we will see the Integration enhancement in my next blog artice
Your P&C
DC*

What’s New in Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v? It’s time to find Your Golden Customer – Part 2

Dears,

This is second part of my earlier blog where we will explore some more enhanced features of Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v.
Data Relationship Management for Oracle Customer Hub – Advanced Customer Hierarchy Management
Advanced Customer Hierarchy Management is enabled within OCH through integration with Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Manager (DRM). This expands hierarchy management capabilities with DRM‟s features made available for UCM accounts, account hierarchies and Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) hierarchies. In this advanced option, data stewards can create new hierarchies; drag and drop new account nodes into and out of a hierarchy; and compare, blend, merge, and delete hierarchies.

With OCH 8.2, users can also edit hierarchies within DRM by clicking the Advanced Hierarchy Management button. In a separate view, users select accounts from 3 places:

* UCM Account Hierarchies,
* UCM Accounts, and
* D&B Account Families.

Once selected, these hierarchies can be exported to DRM, where data stewards can use all DRM features for hierarchy management and manipulation. While working in DRM, data stewards can:

* Create hierarchies: using UCM accounts that were selected and imported into DRM.
* View hierarchies: UCM hierarchies can be browsed and compared to one another. Additionally, each account can be queried for and located across all hierarchies. Additional information on accounts within a hierarchy includes: siblings, parent, ancestors, children, descendants and links.
* Edit hierarchies: Data stewards can insert and remove UCM accounts from a hierarchy, drag and drop UCM accounts, and also delete, blend and merge hierarchies.
After performing changes in DRM, data stewards can return to OCH with the account hierarchies they had previously selected and sent to DRM. All changes in the selected hierarchies, as well as any newly created hierarchies in DRM, will be brought back to OCH upon committing a Save. This action also closes the DRM session, and purges all Hub data from the DRM application. Also, the modified hierarchies are versioned within OCH; in other words, the previous hierarchy version is stored as a History version and the updated hierarchy will be displayed as the current Customer Hub account hierarchy.

MDM Analytics
MDM Analytics dashboards enable data steward to quickly and proactively assess the quality of customer and contact dimensional data entering OCH. Through its ease of use, the dashboard accelerates the data‟s time-to-value and helps to drive better business results by:

1. Pinpointing where data quality improvement is needed;
2. Enabling the data stewards to take corrective action to improve the quality and completeness of the Customer and Contact data; and,
3. Helping to improve organizational confidence in the information.

Master Record Completeness Dashboard Page
The Master Record Completeness dashboard page presents the data steward(s) with a comprehensive view of their organization‟s Customer and Contact data completeness. The data steward(s) is able to quickly determine the state of their data quality and identify data entities. This helps to ensure that organizations have all of the necessary intelligence data to make correct business decisions.

Accuracy Dashboard Page The Accuracy Dashboard page presents the data steward(s) with a view of the activity against their Account and Contact in the system. This dashboard provides the data steward(s) the means to quickly highlight the Customer and Contact records in their system requiring additional attention.

List Import
Oracle OCH allows the business user to perform bulk import operations on Account and Contact records from external systems with easier error management. This functionality is now aligned with the List Import functionality of Siebel Marketing and can be deployed with or without mastering functionalities.
The configurable process allows the business user to import from the following file formats: Delimited text files (such as csv, tab delimited, fixed width, or other delimiter), and XML files. The automated process consists of two steps performed within OCH Administration screens and views: a list import into OCH SDH (Source Data History) tables, and then a batch process which calls existing OCH services for data cleansing, data matching and survivorship
OCH 8.2 delivers the following key benefits:
* Empowers business users to load data
o Configurable metadata driven approach
o Template driven approach
* Error resolution views
* List Import as a web service
Enhanced Stewardship OCH 8.2 Data stewardship capability has been enhanced to not only deliver richer set of features but also to provides a better user experience. The new enhancements and capabilities include:
· Enhanced Survivorship
o Rules Engine Based survivorship to define any rule beyond the seeded Rule Types. Survivorship rules are an automated means of controlling the quality of customer data stored in UCM. Out of the box, we support integration with Siebel Business Rules Engine (Haley) for Business logic based survivorship; integration with any other rules engine can be configured
o New Rule Types – Master and Slave in merge case. Master means the Survivor record selected by the user will win over the Victim record. Slave means the victim record selected by the user will win over the survivor record. In UCM connector case, when incoming request comes in, Master means the values stored in UCM will always win over the incoming record. Slave means the values sent by external application into UCM will always win over the values in the existing best version record.
o Configurable „Date Field enhancement enables customer to choose a different Date field other than the default “Updated” field as the comparison criteria when Recent/History comparison rules are executed.
o Household Survivorship can be configured


· Enhanced Merge/Un-Merge
o Guided Merge using Task Based User Interface allows end-user to review duplicate records and give ability to override the survivorship rules engine outcome in step by step process. Guided merge results in three versions of record in action and allows end user to decide how the final record version in the UCM should look like after the merge task is submitted for process

§ Survivor: The record whose row id will survive
§ Victim: The record that will be deleted
§ Suggested: Record generate as result of running through survivorship engine o Only supported for parent objects  Account  Contact

o Suspects – Incoming record posted to base table as Suspect awaiting Resolution. In previous UCM release, when a new incoming record is flagged as potential duplicate of existing records (manual review case), the new record is NOT created, and instead it is placed in the “Incoming Duplicates” views, waiting for data steward intervention. When Suspect Match feature is enabled, UCM will insert a new record for the manual review case and continue processing, while flagging the record for review later in “Existing Duplicates” views. Suspect record can be updated, deleted or merged via UI or incoming message. Data Steward can choose to approve suspect or can merge into an existing UCM record via Guided Merge or one step merge operation flag.
o Merge Request enhancement provide ability to submit merge request from edge systems using Web Services for two existing records. Synchronous response on the merge request status will be sent to the requestor, i.e. Pending, Rejected etc. Merge requests on records not existing in UCM database will be rejected.
o Enhanced Un-Merge User interface to list only previously merged records.

In my next blog we will see the Enhanced Data Quality and Integration Features that are available with OCH 8.2 V .

Your Partner and Companion

DC*

What’s New in Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v? It’s time to find Your Golden Customer – Part 1

Dears,
It’s been a while we talked about Master Data Management specially my favorite topic Golden Customer Record. I am quiet excited about the new Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 v application and its advanced features. For next few blogs I will be covering these features in details. Hope you will find this useful.

Do you really know Your Customer?

Fragmented inconsistent Customer data hides revenue recognition, introduces risk, creates sales inefficiencies, and results in misguided marketing campaigns and lost customer loyalty.. You’ve been analyzing terabytes of customer data for years. You’ve told your customers and stakeholders that your organization is customer-centric. But your customer data is unreliable and it’s affecting your ability to retain customers, minimize fraud and manage privacy. According to Forrester, 92% of companies believe having an integrated view of customer data is either “critical” or “very important.” Only 2% have actually achieved that goal.

Why have only 2% of companies achieved a 360 Degree Customer view?
· Because customer data integration (CDI) isn’t just about customer relationship management (CRM). Customer data is often created and maintained in non-CRM systems, so different departments have different view of the customer.
· It isn’t about repurposing your data warehouse. A data warehouse is an analytical solution, not an operational, transactional solution.
· And it isn’t about building your own customer master application. That’s too risky–and expensive. Building instead of buying will keep you mired in data model design for years.

Oracle Customer Hub (Siebel UCM)
Oracle Customer Hub (also known as Siebel Universal Customer Master or Siebel UCM) is Oracle’s lead Customer hub solution. Oracle Customer Hub (OCH) leverages the unrivalled domain expertise of the Siebel platform to deliver a rich and complete CDI solution with many unique capabilities. OCH’s comprehensive functionality enables an enterprise to manage customer data over the full customer lifecycle: capturing customer data, standardization and correction of names and addresses; identification and merging of duplicate records; enrichment of the customer profile; enforcement of compliance and risk policies; and the distribution of the “single source of truth” best version customer profile to operational systems.

Oracle Customer Hub (OCH) 8.2 is a major release of the Customer master solution of the Oracle Master Data Management (MDM) portfolio, probably one of the largest in several years. This release’s ambition is to help organization turn their data into true corporate assets. It is focused on 3 major themes: best in class data governance, end-to-end data quality, and pre-built integration.

· Best in class data governance relates to
o The availability of the first tool of the market built to address the needs of Data Governance professionals: Data Governance Manager
o A new module enabling best in class hierarchy management with the inclusion of Hyperion Data Relationship Management within OCH providing analytical MDM and hierarchy manipulations capabilities.
o MDM analytics
o Enhanced stewardship capabilities
· End-to-end data quality provides a complete framework enabling controlled path to higher data quality levels for the enterprise, the visible part of MDM projects
· Pre-built integration through enhanced web services and Application Integration Architecture provides faster deployments because MDM is pre-cabled to consuming apps made “MDM Aware” .
New Enhanced Features of Oracle Customer Hub 8.2 V
Oracle Siebel OCH 8.2 includes a rich set of features providing an end-to-end data governance solution. The key components that constitute data governance include
· Data Governance Manager
· Advanced Customer Hierarchy Management
· MDM Analytics
· List Import
· Advanced Data Stewardship

Data Governance Manager (DGM)
DGM is a solution targeted to help organizations with the centralized administration of enterprise data governance. It delivers a new web 2.0-like user interface that simplifies hub operations by enabling organizations to easily monitor and track key hub data quality metrics and the sources of bad data, while also allowing easy access to data repair operations. DGM has been built to meet the requirements of data governance professionals especially in the area of
· Define and communicate data definitions, policies and business rules
· Operate consolidate, share and cleanse hub functions
· Monitor hub operations and track sources of bad data in the enterprise
· Fix data issues proactively and help tune data quality rules

Oracle Data Governance Manager (DGM) provides an intuitive graphical user interface as the single management destination for data stewards and business users alike. Using DGM, data stewards can easily perform stewardship operations on cross-departmental data in a centralized place. The DG overseeing group can also manage the data stewards performance and workloads and generate data quality assessments to monitor and demonstrate progress for continued executive support. DGM serves as a place to define and set enterprise master data policies and to monitor and fix data issues. It also helps operate the different functions in the MDM data lifecycle: Consolidate, Master, Cleanse, Share and Govern, and is designed around these functions, giving easy access to them

Master
The Master section shows the number of records that have been created and/or updated within a given period of time. DGM shows results for contacts and/or accounts and allowing for drill-down to individual records. This information gives insight into the activity that has taken place in the MDM hub.
Consolidate
In Consolidate, DGM helps operate data consolidation tasks with a workbench that creates, manages and monitors batch import activities. Data stewards are can start batch import jobs into the MDM hub very quickly and directly from DGM. The steward can also view completed and pending jobs, as well as perform any immediate correction of rejected records from a previously run batch job.
Cleanse
Poor data quality can increase the cost and complexity across the enterprise. DGM enables continuous monitoring of data quality within the MDM hub by tracking data quality metrics around completeness, at a record and attribute level. It shows the data quality level for the MDM hub and all registered external system, allowing data stewards to monitor the data and identify bad sources of data that they can then resolve accordingly.
Share
DGM shows detailed information on the MDM hub‟s real-time activity in its Share function. It shows the number of updates, merges and unmerges that have happened in the system in a given period of time.
Govern
Governance involves keeping track of and defining data metadata and rules that will ultimately dictate how the enterprise data runs. DGM provides a working queue for manual resolution cases for the data steward. It also provides easy access to multiple administration and rule definition screens of the customer hub. Additionally, DGM links to reference documents to view the agreed upon data definitions. Finally, it acts as a dashboard to access data remediation tools, such as Data Watch and Repair.

We will see the next feature "Advanced Customer Hierarchy Management " in my next blog tommorow, Thanks the support and encouragement I received from readers of my blog which keeps me driving and contribute everyday.

Your Loving Partner and Companion

DC*

Making your CRM “Live” Post “Go Live”

Dears,
Let me congratulate for making your first milestone achievement of successful CRM go live. Indeed a great achievement but how do you keep your CRM alive with all the post go live dilemmas and pressure. Here are my Critical Lifeline strategies for you to consider and make a progressive attempt to make your CRM live beyond the battle.

1. A critical factor in achieving post implementation success is to make sure that the CRM software solution directly supports your customer strategy and mirrors your business process model. Accomplishment of this objective begins in the design and planning stage and must be continually revisited during and following the implementation. Implementing CRM software without corresponding CRM strategy is an uphill battle that will eventually unseat even the most successful software implementations.
2. Use the CRM solution to its fullest extent. The more it is used, the sooner its usage becomes second nature and the sooner that benefits are realized.
3. In an era of increased compliance and demand for constant system uptime, make sure you build system redundancy and secure the data with a proper system backup as well as business continuity program.
4. Establish the most salient metrics, begin with a base line and generate ROI and productivity reports on a periodic basis. This will show you what is working or not working relative to initial expectations. It will allow efforts to be put into areas that generate the highest impact results and adjust those areas that are not achieving success. For instance: If there is a specific marketing objective supported by an outreach program – follow it closely, generate reports, analyze, learn and take action.
5. Get recurring feedback from all CRM stakeholders. Understand their perceptions of what is working and not working. Find out what aspects of the CRM implementation they find to be of the greatest benefits and disappointments. Catalogue and prioritize their suggestions or recommendations for continued efforts.
6. Proper training of all employees is crucial to post implementation success. This includes clear communications between executives and staff on exactly what is expected of whom and what rewards and or system of benefits are in place for success. Training is a recurring program which should be initiated at least with every CRM software upgrade.
7. Maintain a working relationship with the CRM Vendor or solution provider. This relationship will keep you abreast of new advancements and opportunities.
8. Monitor the data continuously. Make sure that you not only capture customer information and other important data, but also remove bad data that can “gum up” your system. All to often duplicate forms or entries can impinge on productivity. Old data such as closed out accounts need to be removed if they are not properly identified. In other words, keep the system up to date and periodically review the application for duplicate accounts, deprecated information and other erroneous data.
9. Optimize your software as you gain experience with the system. Fine tuning CRM will streamline data entry, reduce duplicate keying and make the system much more user friendly. Make sure all your redundant customer information is cleansed and duplicates are merged or removed.
10. Most Important CRM is a journey and no CRM abruptly end unless you shut down your business. Focus on continuous improvement either in terms of enhancement or upgrade and give the users the comfort that all their concerns would be addressed by the technical team and they live with a CRM they love.


Ramadan Kareem to all my Muslim Friends and Happy Ganesh Jayanthi to all my Fellow Hindu friends.


Your Partner and Companion


D C *

Customer Intelligence: Get your Customer Insight Right

Dears,
As more and more companies invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives, it is becoming apparent that customer insight is a key component of any CRM strategy. Many companies started their CRM initiatives by implementing call centers or sales force automation tools with the primary goal of increasing the efficiency of their customer-facing operations. These same companies are now looking to segment their customers by needs and value so they can define acquisition, retention and cross-selling opportunities. Other companies began their CRM initiatives by researching customer behavior, needs and wants, and are now trying to drive strategies through various channels in the most efficient way.

Regardless of where a company began in its CRM efforts, the following capabilities are critical for achieving successful deployment of any customer strategy:

• Customer Insight: Ongoing research into the traits and behavior that create customer segments, ensure stability and track customer migrations.

• Strategic Insight: Continual executive monitoring of ROI to ensure the key metrics are trending in the right direction and the strategy is performing successfully.

• Organizational Insight: Managers monitoring of CRM process details to ensure that the train is on the right track, the organization is adopting and continues to adopt new processes and technologies, and that all of the blocking and tackling needed to support the strategy is working well.

• Experience Insight: Monitoring different customer interactions or behavior to react to changes in the environment as quickly as possible.

• Decision Insight: The review and ongoing updating of a best practices knowledge base and lessons learned, enabling companies to make well-informed decisions and better react to internal process issues, changes in customer behavior or any other key metrics that are not trending in the right direction.

Collectively, these capabilities are defined as Customer Intelligence (CI), the core analytical requirements for an optimized CRM strategy. Successful implementation of Customer Intelligence solutions directly leads to better customer understanding, increased competitive advantage based on this deeper understanding, enhanced customer profitability and improved customer experiences.To begin a Customer Intelligence strategy, companies should first use a Customer Intelligence (CI) Roadmap for their organization that identifies how they are approaching implementing core CI capabilities. By becoming familiar with the common stages in a Customer Intelligence program, organizations can improve their existing CI capabilities, identify where new opportunities exist, and enact a strategy for implementing these solutions.

THE FOUR STAGES OF THE CI ROADMAP

There are 4 critical stages of the CI Roadmap, Brief note about these stages given for your reference.

• CI Infrastructure: Integration of information from across the enterprise into a 360-degree view of the customer for analytical purposes.

• Business Performance Management: Use of dashboards and scorecards to assess corporate and operational performance. • Decision Enablement: The ability to be proactively alerted to issues, track decisions and leverage past decision performance to influence current and future decision making.
• Business Activity Monitoring: Real-time alerts to current issues and automation of the decision making process to remedy problems.

Though not required to be implemented in order, the CI Roadmap increases in the effectiveness of the visual interface to the different types of insight (customer, strategic, organizational, decision), as well as the automation of the decision process itself. Companies often find themselves at different stages of the CI Roadmap, since many organizations have interpreted and built out their CRM initiative in a variety of ways. In the end, organizations need to apply all of the concepts of the Roadmap to support a comprehensive CI initiative, but each organization may implement these in a different order based on their priorities, needs and current situations.

Customer Intelligence plays an important role in helping companies gain the full value from their CRM initiatives. It identifies cost and revenue opportunities, provides a vehicle for a closed-loop, continuous improvement environment and continues to monitor the initiatives and detailed processes that make up a CRM program. No matter where companies find themselves on the CI Roadmap, implementing elements of all four tiers is a critical piece of a comprehensive Customer Intelligence strategy.

Your Loving Partner and Companion

DC*

CRM Anatomy : How well your Hip Bone connect to Your Thigh Bone ?

Dears

I’ve decided to convert this blog into a lesson on Anatomy, Surprised....Just Kidding :)

I actually want to talk about systems. But I don’t mean technology, I mean systems–the way thing work, how things interrelate, specifically in acquiring and retaining customers.
The way we acquire and retain customers is a complex inter-relationship of different activities and processes. These processes occur within our organizations, for example through sales and marketing, with our customers–their buying processes, and in the surrounding community–our competition, opinion leaders, and others. All these “subsystems” are connected together, they depend on each other, respond to each other. Likewise, these systems don’t work well in isolation or without the other systems. For example, a selling process is meaningless unless aligned with a customer engaged in a buying process.
The complexity of these systems and their relationships cause us to break them down, focusing on subsystems and components. We start to specialize in these subsystems, for example, marketing may focus on demand and lead generation. We in sales focus on our selling processes. It’s a natural and probably the only way to manage the complexity and begin to design, develop, execute and manage our customer acquisition and retention processes.
Designers and engineers try to manage the complexity of the interrelationships between subsystems by trying to define clean interfaces–defined inputs and outputs. The theory being as long as we keep the inputs and outputs the same, we can change anything within the subsystem and not have an impact on the overall system performance. We try to do that as we define our marketing and selling processes — it’s perfectly reasonable and puts some manageability to what we do.
Designers and engineers design subsystems, trying to keep clean interfaces, optimizing the overall system. Here’s where some of the challenge comes in. First, as much as we try, it’s very difficult to keep clean interfaces — even in designing “products.” For example, when we develop mechanical assemblies, we design within certain tolerances. As we try to fit those parts together, each subsystem that worked on its own–used the expected inputs and delivered the expected outputs, now the system as a whole doesn’t achieve it’s objective. In the case of mechanical assemblies, this problem is called “tolerance stack-up.” Each part meets its tolerance requirements, but when I try to fit them all together, they don’t fit.
We see the same thing in out processes for acquiring and retaining customers. Marketing may define a perfect lead nurturing and qualification process, it may fit the “specs” perfectly; but when it is “assembled” with the sales lead/qualifiation process, it blows up and doesn’t work. Something is lost in the interfaces, something is lost in the interrelationship of these processes.
The problem gets more complex — at least with sales and marketing. Designers and engineers know that all the subsystems must come together and work as a whole. They understand that missing major subsystems means the thing doesn’t work. A car without a braking system doesn’t works very effectively as a car.
We seem to forget the need for “clean interfaces” and the view of the “whole,” looking at our customer acquisition and retention processes–sales and marketing. CSO Insight’s 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Study provides some interesting clues about these issues. We design our sales prospecting strategies around achieving certain goals and objectives, yet we cut marketing budgets for lead generation. We base our quotas around certain sales performance levels, but we cut training budgets so we don’t develop the skills of sales people to perform at the expected levels.
Now let me add another level of complexity. In sales and marketing, the interfaces are never clean. Moreover, they are constantly changing. Using my car analogy, it’s kind of like installing a new braking system while driving at top speed on a curvy mountain road–covered with ice. It’s not a trivial problem to solve. One of the ways we start managing this is simple, we start talking to each other. The days of marketing and selling “silo’s” are over. We have to have to coordinate our programs, processes, goals, investments. We need to start collaborating. We need “interlock” what we do with the other functions in our organization. (As a side note, Andrew Rudin is looking at this same issue from a slightly different perspective, “Fools Gold: Searching For The Most Important Step Will Ruin Your Sales Process.” Take the time to read it, it reall compliments some of the points I am making.)
I’ll stop here — but there’s more, so far I’ve been focused on our marketing and selling subsystems. Now imagine adding the customer buying and community subsystems into the mix. I’ll talk about these in the next blog post. I’ll leave you sitting at the edges of your seats for now.
There are a couple of things that I’d like to conclude with:
We do have to break down these processes, developing high performance subsystems. There is so much that can be gained by optimizing these subsystems and processes. All the work that is being done to improve marketing effectiveness and processes is critical to our organizations. Likewise, all the work that we do in improving sales processes, performance and effectiveness is critical.
While we are “solving” those problems, we must be cognizant that what we do with these subsystems may not work when you look at the system as a whole. Ultimately, we have to look at how all the pieces – parts fit together. Does the “whole” work together to achieve the results we want? Are we making changes to one subsystem that adversely impact another subsystem?
As sales and marketing professionals, we need to be thinking in “systems” terms. We need to think how subsystems fit into the overall system and how we interlock on programs, processes, goals and objectives.
What do you think?
Stay tuned, the real challenge is still ahead!

Your 10 Steps towards meaningful CRM ROI

Dears,

Many firms have spent millions pursuing CRM, but most have blindly thrown money away. When proper economic planning occurs, controlling CRM investments by spending to achieve specific benefits is practical in any economy. So, if an enterprise has leaped into a CRM initiative without having armed itself with an adequate plan for achieving ROI and analysis of the ultimate benefits of CRM, it should backtrack (but not cancel current initiatives) and complete the following 10 steps. This will then properly position the enterprise to forecast and achieve ROI, and prioritize projects within the initiative while continuing to pursuing CRM, even in tight economic times.

The 10 steps to forecasting and achieving ROI from CRM investments include:

1) Determine the costs and benefits for business operations.
An enterprise must understand its cost and benefit metrics before it can make improvements. This should include sales, marketing, customer service and support cost and benefit metrics. It will also need to identify benchmarks and continuing measurements to ensure that it meets its metrics.

2) Establish realistic goals.
To do this, an enterprise compares its metrics against the enterprise’s business goals and its own customer service standards, and benchmarks these against competitors. Benchmarking should be done with care, as each competitor most likely has its own (different) strategies. Business goals should be stated in the form of a future desired state (e.g., to achieve an overall sales margin of 30 percent within the next 12 months).

3) Define objectives for each project in the program.
Each objective should consist of activities, start and end dates, costs for each step, and a measurable result. It is important to be certain that each objective is achievable and becomes the measure of whether the projects are on track.

4) Define the necessary changes in enterprise wide activities.
With clearly defined objectives, the enterprise can describe how marketing, selling and servicing activities must change to achieve the desired goal. Armed with this knowledge, the enterprise can begin to define strategies, processes and tactics for its overall CRM initiatives, and then “drill down” to the specific functionality requirements that it desires to be technology-enabled via its tactical implementations of sales, marketing and customer service and support systems, the three domains of CRM. The enterprise must also realize that not all processes or tactics will be able to be technology-enabled, nor should they. Therefore, it should be expected and planned that some manual processes may benefit from the redesign of the process in conjunction with some technology, but they will not be supported or replaced by technology.

5) Establish the functional and architectural requirements.
When determining functional requirements, involve the whole enterprise, including the IS organization,finance, sales and marketing, and support business unit end users. The critical steps are identifying and prioritizing the system functionality that will best enable the desired marketing, selling or servicing activities. Defining the accompanying architectural requirements is primarily the responsibility of the IS staff, in that each tactical implementation must fit within the enterprise’s overall CRM IT architectural strategy. These requirements should be based on the knowledge of future enterprise architecture strategies, enabling technologies and the requirements to interface with enterprise systems. With the emergence of CRM suites , there are options to a best-of-breed approach and, in tough economic times, the functional trade-offs may be appealing, as these suites continue to emerge.


6) Define and calculate the TCO.
An enterprise should then build a full understanding of what the cost (e.g., fixed and recurring costs, over three years) will be to provide the functionality needed to achieve the CRM strategy, for each of the domains of CRM. Total cost of ownership (TCO) should consider not only the technology costs (i.e., hardware and software), but also the people and process costs. People costs include education and skills training for the internal project team as well as for internal employees outside the project team. Change management and knowledge transfer costs from integrators are examples of process costs that must be included in the TCO.

7) Forecast the program and project ROI.
An estimate of project ROI should then be calculated based on an understanding of what the return (i.e., achievement of goal) will be given the investment (i.e., TCO). To forecast overall program ROI, an enterprise must forecast the ROI for each CRM domain and pull these together into one overall program ROI. As a caution, it is best to work with the enterprise’s financial organization to complete this, and be
wary of vendor’s models as they usually do not consider all the costs and benefits specific to “your enterprise.” In addition, they may be too general to provide the real picture. Many of the ROI models Gartner has reviewed do not include, for example, the detailed TCO that is unique to the organization across the people and process components, and benefits are generally “averages” based on assumptions which may not hold true for all enterprises.

8) Implement the pilot and measure it.
The pilot is intended to implement the system functions as defined earlier in the planning process. This system functionality should enable the future enterprise wide CRM processes that will help achieve CRM objectives. In tight economic times, rather than implementing “big bang” projects, attempt the tactical,
smaller projects first that fit within the overall plan to achieve quick ROI.

9) Adjust the strategy and plan the rollout.
The CRM program and project manager, or chief CRM officer, should be confident that the pilot results (i.e., for each implementation) can be duplicated during the rollout. If not, adjustments in system functionality and training will be required. Pilot length always should depend on the project team’s confidence level in achieving the projected benefits.

10) Achieve ROI throughout the rollout and continue measuring.
ROI within CRM projects will be realized when the entire organization is fully trained and competent with its new marketing, selling and servicing paradigm. In most organizations, enterprise wide behaviors must change to ensure the project delivers ROI. Technology alone will not produce the benefits projected in any ROI calculation. Project break-even points occur after full rollout, when new marketing, selling and servicing behaviors and activities allow the enterprise to realize its goals. A fast rollout and high system adoption rates enable ROI to be realized as quickly as possible.


Bottom Line: Many forecasts of ROI are not realized in CRM projects. Today, Research Analyst estimates that 80 percent of enterprises pursuing CRM are not performing business justifications. This partly due to incomplete ROI calculations and because no plan was developed to accurately measure the effects of CRM projects on ROI. Thus, it is important to establish a plan to achieve a measurable ROI through all phases of CRM initiatives.

6 Six Sacred Laws of Customer Experience (CxP)

Dears,

As promised in my last blog, please find the 6 sacred laws of customer experience.

CxP Law #1: Every Interaction Creates a Personal Reaction
This is the most fundamental customer experience (CxP) law of them all. Simply put, experiences are totally in the eyes of the beholder. The same exact experience can be good for one person and bad for another. As a matter of fact, it can be good for someone at one point in time and then bad for that same person at another point in time. That's why we often say "experiences designed for everyone satisfy no one."

CxP Law #2: People Are Instinctively Self-Centered

Everyone has their own frame of reference, which heavily influences what they do and how they do it. Customers, for instance, care intensely about their own needs and desires but they don't generally know or care as much about how companies are organized. Employees also have their individual frame of reference; which often includes a deeper understanding of products, company, organization, and subject matter .If left unchecked, decisions made inside of companies will often reflect the frame of reference of employees, not customers. We sometimes call this problem self referential design.

You can't eliminate your biases, but it helps to acknowledge them. Recognize that customers may not understand things like product names, acronyms, and process steps that you regularly discuss at work. So there's a natural bias for making experiences too complicated for customers. Get in the habit of asking yourself: "Would our target customers fully understand this?"

CxP Law #3: Customer Familiarity Breeds Alignment
Not many people wake up in the morning and say "today, I want to make life miserable for our customers." Yet every day, lots of employees (from front-liners to senior execs) make decisions that end up frustrating, annoying, or downright upsetting their customers. But it's often not individual actions that cause the problems. Often times, the issues come down to a lack of cooperation or coordination across people and organizations.Given that most people want their company to better serve customers, a clear view of what customers need, want, and dislike can align decisions and actions. If everyone shared a vivid view of the target customers and had visibility into customer feedback, then there would be less disagreement about what to do for them. While it may be difficult to agree on overall priorities and strategies, it's much easier to agree on the best way to treat customers.

CxP Law #4: Unengaged Employees Don't Create Engaged Customers
If you want to improve customer experience, then it might seem obvious that you should focus completely on customers. For most firms, though, that's not the correct approach. Where should you focus? On employees. While you can make some customers happy through brute force, you can not sustain great customer experience unless your employees are bought-in to what you're doing and are aligned with the effort. If employees have low morale, then getting them to "wow" customers will be nearly impossible.

Walt Disney also captured this concept very simply:

“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

CxP Law #5: Employees Do What Is Measured, Incented, and Celebrated
Some executives struggle to understand why their company doesn't deliver better experiences to customers. But it shouldn't be such a big mystery. It's all about how you deal with employees, who tend to conform to the environment that they're in. What are the key elements to the corporate environs? The metrics that are tracked, the activities that are rewarded, and the actions that are celebrated. These three items collectively drive how employees behave and how they ultimately treat customers.

CxP Law #6: You Can’t Fake It
You can fool some people for some of the time, but most people can eventually tell what’s real and what’s not. This shows up in a couple of areas. First of all, employees can sense if customer experience is not really a top priority with the executive team. The second place this shows up is in marketing efforts. No matter how much money you spend on advertising, you can’t convince customers that you provide better experiences than you do.

Don’t Break The 6 Laws
The 6 laws of customer experience are not meant to constrain behaviors. They are meant to empower highly effective customer experience efforts. By understanding these fundamental truths about how people and organizations behave, companies can make smarter decisions about what they do, and how they do it. Going against any of these laws will likely cause poor results. But if you conform to these laws, then you’re better positioned to deliver great experiences to your customers.

Your Partner and Companion

DC*

Winning by Understanding: Competing on Customer Experience

Dears,
Businesses today claim they are more concerned about the customer than ever before. Enormous amounts of corporate time and money are being poured into increasing customer service levels, tracking customer ‘satisfaction,’ and trying to profile current and future customer needs. There is much talk about becoming ‘customer centric,’ and a whole industry has grown up around ‘customer relationship management.’

And yet why is it that our experience as customers is often appallingly bad? How many times, for example, do we endure automated call centre systems when we just want to ask a simple question? Why aren’t there single queuing systems at most train stations? Why do so many restaurants treat you with disdain? The problem is, most businesses still don’t apply a serious, coherent approach to the overall experience they are giving customers. But therein lies the opportunity.

The key challenge in business is not to merely satisfy your customers but to genuinely delight them on a consistent and repeatable basis. In other words, to package and deliver an experience to each customer which they will have no hesitation in describing as “totally awesome”.

When customers are delighted:

• They become more loyal to your business and will go out of their way to recommend you to their friends and associates.
• They deepen their relationship with your firm – allowing you to sell them more products and services in the future.
• They come to know your brand, and it means more to them.
• You differentiate yourself from all your competitors simply and powerfully.
• You lower your marketing and product development costs – because loyal customers will tell you what they really want and need.

In essence, any organization’s immediate success and long-term viability depends entirely on the quality of the relationship formed with each individual customer. The more customers have a great experience in dealing with you, the more loyal they become and the more follow-on business they will do in the future. Developing, delivering and then evaluating the level of delight in each of your customer’s experiences is critical business building activities.

Never has the opportunity been greater to create loyal customers. In today’s business environment customers are more in control of how they think, feel and act than ever before. The norm has delightfully become the old Burger King tagline, ‘Have it your way’. The reality is, customers will continue to gain increased access to greater numbers of offerings through different mediums over the next decade. This increased access will only accelerate the customer’s influence and control over the offerings they wish to receive and accept. Customers will want offerings that not only fill their unique needs, desires and dreams but also delight them – quickly.

The 6 Laws of Customer Experience

Just like the three laws that govern all of physics, there are a set of fundamental truths about how customer experience operates. And here they are, the 6 laws of customer experience (CxP):

1) Every interaction creates a personal reaction.
2) People are instinctively self-centered.
3) Customer familiarity breeds alignment.
4) Unengaged employees don't create engaged customers.
5) Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated.
6) You can't fake it.


Jack Welch has said:

"Deal with the world as it is, not how you'd like it to be."

When it comes to customer experience, these 6 laws describe how it is. While some isolated situations may not follow these 6 laws, they accurately describe the dynamics of customer experience for large organizations. Anyone looking to improve customer experience must understand and comply with these underlying realities. And in case you're wondering,
Experience-Based Differentiation is 100% compliant!

THE BOTTOM LINE: WHEN IT COMES TO THE 6 LAWS OF
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, IGNORANCE IS NOT A VALID DEFENSE.

I'll take a closer look at each of these laws in later tomorrow blog post . For now, just get acquainted with them.

Your Partner and Companion
DC*

Hotties in the CRM Solutions “What makes them Different”

Dears,
Customer emotional reaction plays an important role in deciding whether the customer buys again or not. Purchase decisions are not just about the right price, product, location etc but also the customer feelings. There is value in evoking emotions in customers. Managing customer emotions is necessary as the creation of emotional bonds between a company and its customers are a strong influence. Customers will surely remember the negative things they experience. Therefore these emotions are very important. Companies are finding that emotional influences are essential.

The hotties in the CRM solutions field help you learn about your competitors and give you an insight into whether or not your products are overpriced. They thus help companies to identify, deal with competitors threats, help in learning about your competitors, staying ahead in the rat race and ultimately securing an edge over the competition. CRM's new offerings go a step beyond that, ensure that the customer is sent back satisfied and ensures that he will indeed continue to return. They also help to collect the right kind of customer satisfaction data from the customers.
Here we see below some new entrants to CRM space, This is not to claim that they are superior to any of the established brand in the CRM space like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce or Microsoft but just to what do they focus to make customer experience lot more better and flexibility they provide to the organizations.

Modular CRM
TechExcel CRM
Wintouch eCRM
The OpenBOX Business Suite
Diamelle's CRM
Made2Manage Customer Relationship Management (M2M CRM)
CRM on the Go
Pocket PC CRM

Advantages of CRM's New Entrants:
Achieving Customer Satisfaction
Older CRM solutions do not place as much attention on the customer experience as the new ones do. The plethora of CRM solutions that have been available in the market have all this time strived to better the customer experience but haven't exceeded as much as they need to. The new offerings from CRM manage to identify and solve problems that are generated and reduce the service cost per customer. The past decade has seen a new approach that focuses primarily on creating solutions that help organizations cater to their customer requirements. The new CRM software system rather than dictating the actions that employees must take seek to provide employees with the tools and resources that are needed to take the required decisions.
Product Improvement
The new solutions help to improve the design of the products through paying keen attention to customer feedback and suggestions. They focus on the idea that If one customer would like to see something improved in the product, there are others with the same sentiment.
Aiding Sales
For the sales departments the new solutions definitely help to figure out what actually sells and what doesn't. They help companies know why customers buy from them and why they don't. Since purchase reasons tend to change over time, it is important to continually check customer feedback and respond the right way. The new CRM solutions result in higher sales revenues.
Adapting to Change
Most vendor offerings seldom possess the adaptability that is so essential to success. However this is clearly a thing of the past. These new solutions have the capacity to deal adequately with an ever changing environment. They help the organizations to adapt to the changes taking place both inside and outside the organization. This is a development over traditional CRM solutions. A striking feature of the new CRM solutions is their ability to contribute to the overall growth of the organization. Traditionally CRM solutions only served to uplift certain departments only. However this is certainly not the case with the new CRM solutions. Overall productivity increases as the CRM solution pays individual attention to each department. They have been able to push the existing resources to the right place at exactly the right time, create more flexibility and ultimately cope with greater uncertainty. This has resulted in the absolute increase in customer value.
Meeting Competition
With the advent of the Internet the purchase and sales function has become a child's task. Businesses find that coping with their competitors is getting harder and realize that they need to keep up with them. Often finding and maintaining that competitive edge requires a lot of time and effort. CRM's new solutions manage to give organizations that extra edge that is so essential in business activities.
Increased Customization
Despite the fact that CRM solutions boast of being able to customize themselves, in reality there is very little evidence of this actually taking place. This is a disadvantage that results in a waste of a lot of time and effort. Fortunately for CRM users the new solutions available in the market go a long way in mitigating this difficulty. They manage to customize themselves with remarkable ease thereby reducing the costs and time involved. The new solutions are designed to flexibly accommodate non CRM systems. They are much more open-ended and designed to facilitate the changing needs of the organization. One other advantage that the new CRM solutions have over the traditional ones is that they are particularly useful for innovation. This is not possible with the older ones as they are not useful in innovation environments. CRM new solutions are scalable as well as flexible.

Good Day and Nice Weekend

Your Loving Partner and Companion

DC*

Top 10 Marketing Processes for Next 5 Years

Dears,
The role of marketing is strategically changing and will become increasingly process-driven. Redefining and automating key processes will ensure that your organization maintains a competitive advantage during the next five years. Not all 10 processes will be important or have the same degree of importance for all organizations. Prioritize the processes you want to define and automate for competitive advantage, and create a road map for process automation .Technology and vendor selection should follow documentation of processes to ensure that solutions adequately support the processes you want to change or automate.

Here, we detail the top 10 marketing processes for companies to automate during the next five Years that will drive effectiveness through increased revenue and those that will manage costs by promoting operational efficiency.

1. Behavior-Based Segmentation: To develop effective CRM strategies, companies will need to redefine how they formally segment customers into groups based on customers' wants and needs. Ad hoc segmentation based on campaign and product often fails to appropriately identify customers' or prospects' needs, increasing campaign costs and diluting revenue generation. Segmentation based on customer value also fails to target offers that are relevant to the customer. Developing a formal strategy of segmenting customers based on needs (life stage) or wants (lifestyle) enables companies to identify products and services that are relevant for customers and prospects in those segments. Then, companies can develop campaigns and offers to select, acquire, retain and cross-sell customers based on those identified products and services. Companies will need to move from focusing on demographic information to collecting psychographic information.

Action Item: Formally segment your customers into eight to 12 groups that have a clearly identifiable and enduring set of wants and needs from your organization. Appoint segment managers who develop strategies for growing customer value in each of these segments and establish objectives. Set measurable goals for selection, acquisition, retention, cross-sell and customer value. Managers should then micro segment or model their segments to target specific offers and campaigns to meet segment objectives. Ensure that the rest of the organization (for example, sales, contact center, e-commerce, partners) is aligned around these customer segments.

2. Campaign Management (Planning to Customer Communication): Companies must identify the process steps for creating, executing and measuring different types of campaigns.

• Steps for outbound campaigns include planning (ensure alignment of customer segments and goals), tactical segmentation to target in the identified segments, prioritization of offers, identification of appropriate channels for communication, business rules for single step vs. multistep campaigns, creation of content of communication, suppression of offers based on customer preferences and/or contact rules, campaign tracking and closed-loop measurement.

• Steps for event-triggered campaigns include identification of appropriate triggers, definition of trigger, analysis of data streams to detect triggers, prioritization of triggers, creation of content, scripts, information for offers, execution of triggers including channels, suppression based on customer preferences or contact rules and measurement.

• Steps for inbound marketing campaigns include identification of relevant data for scoring, type of scoring (batch, real time, dynamic and spontaneous) based on data and channel, creation of content and identification of information for offers, suppression based on customer preferences and contact rules, execution based on channel and measurement.

The Web channel and Web analytics provide a vehicle for reaching millions of customers and analyzing their behavior and buying patterns. Campaign and offer optimization can help prioritize campaigns for individuals or customer segments across the mix of campaign types.

Action Item: Establish a multichannel, campaign management process. Use event-triggered and inbound marketing capabilities to increase customer relevancy and improve timing of offers.Avoid customer fatigue from over marketing by prioritizing across different types of campaigns, and suppressing offers based on customer preferences and contact rules.


3. Dialogue Management: Ongoing customer dialogue, managed appropriately, can improve a customer's satisfaction with a company, leading to increased loyalty and future buying. From a process perspective, it is important to create a dialogue with a customer from acquisition and on boarding throughout various phases of the relationship, establishing rules for frequency and channels used for contact. Customers can provide contact preferences for ongoing communications. Content included in these interactions should be timely and relevant, but interactions do not necessarily always need to contain an offer. There should also be mechanisms for soliciting and capturing customer feedback so that a dialogue can occur; does not just have an ongoing monologue directed at the customer. Based on feedback, the company may send customers additional or different types of communications to continue the dialogue.

Action Item: Define a process for maintaining customer contact from acquisition through the customer's life cycle with your company. Include the customer in the conversation by requesting feedback, and establish rules to respond. Solicit customer input on frequency and channels for such contact. Ensure that the information created in the dialogue does not conflict with company campaigns.


4. Lead Management: Lead management is a process that aligns marketing and sales from lead generation to lead execution. By expanding marketing's role in the process, companies can
improve lead quality and ensure higher conversion rates by sales. Process steps for marketing
include lead generation, collection, qualification, prioritization, augmentation and distribution .

Action Item: Expand the role of marketing in the lead management process to reduce burdens on sales with lead qualification and prioritization. Leverage insights in marketing to better qualify leads. Use marketing data and content to augment leads prior to sending them to sales. Support lead distribution based on channel fit with lead type and size of opportunity and available
resources.

5. Loyalty Management: Many loyalty management programs are based on points and reward systems, and often are "siloed" from other marketing, sales and customer service systems, creating another silo with which the customer interacts. As a result, the efforts of reward systems are often lost on the next poor interaction or bad experience the customer has with the organization. The next generation of loyalty management will identify customer processes that build or destroy customer loyalty, integrating reward systems with other CRM systems to ensure consistent customer experience and building loyalty (rather than eroding it) among customers who bring value to the organization.

Action Item: Rethink customer loyalty programs beyond point and reward systems. Make loyalty at least one goal of your CRM strategy. Ensure that processes are in place for recognizing and appropriately responding to your most loyal customers across the enterprise.

6. Brand Management (Creative Idea to Fulfillment): Brand is an important component of the customer's experience and for building loyalty. Processes for production management ensure that creative ideas are managed to brand guidelines with appropriate reviews and approvals captured in the system. A content or digital asset repository enables companies to store the created assets for reuse, and to store valuable information associated with the use and
effectiveness of the created materials/assets. Marketing fulfillment processes ensure central
control while providing guidelines and templates for localization of content, as well as supporting
access and procurement of the most up-to-date marketing materials by the field (for example,
field marketing, sales and distribution partners). The automation and integration of all three
competency areas support brand management in an end-to-end process from creative idea to
fulfillment.
Action Item: Identify the brand you want to create for your company. Define processes for
production management, knowledge management and fulfillment, establishing a road map for
automation and integration.

7. Budgeting and Financial Management: Most marketing organizations lack visibility and oversight into marketing spending, frustrating the finance organization. Budgets are created from the top down and then managed in individual spreadsheets that are difficult to reconcile and aggregate costs. Analysis can take months to perform, with results typically providing insight into what was spent but no ability to manage and control the budget as it's being spent. Finance pressures are driving more marketing organizations to consider standardizing their budgeting and financial management processes in the marketing function for planning and tracking committed funds vs. actual spending. Companies can create real-time alerts for overspending and better manage costs on an ongoing basis. Companies can more easily reallocate funds on an ongoing basis.
Action Item: Create a standard set of planning, budgeting and financial management processes for the marketing organization. Include processes for monitoring and alerting that enable ongoing financial management and reallocation of funds. Engage with finance for selection and
implementation.

8. Marketing Operations Management: There is substantial waste in most marketing
departments, with approximately 25% of the marketing budget spent on producing and managing marketing programs rather than on the actual promotions/campaigns. Being able to significantly reduce this waste can enable marketing not only to save money but also to reallocate that money to campaigns and promotions that drive revenue. More companies are appointing marketing operations directors who facilitate the process between marketing and IT to leverage technology in ways that improve marketing's operational processes. In the future, this role will create an operations office that measures, monitors and refines marketing processes on an ongoing basis to improve efficiencies and reduce marketing costs. In some organizations, particularly productcentric organizations, these processes may extend into sales and operations planning.

Action Item: Appoint a marketing operations director and create a marketing operations office. Leverage this role and office on an ongoing basis to look for operational process improvements.


9. Strategic Planning and Marketing Performance Management: Most marketing decisions are made from the top down, based more on an innate feeling rather than actual data, and are often based on misguided instincts. Data can provide better insight into past results and expected performance. However, data-driven decisions often miss some of the qualitative aspects of analysis that can significantly affect outcomes. The best strategic planning strategies will incorporate processes that support a top-down (management/corporate goals and objectives) approach and bottom-up (data/results/forecasts) approach.
Creating a framework for marketing performance management across marketing enables
marketing organizations to consistently measure and optimize the marketing mix. Using this
framework as input into the strategic planning process empowers the CMO and marketing
managers, coupled with their knowledge and experience, to formulate a better marketing
strategy. An important component of this framework will be the company's ability to measure and predict marketing ROI (revenue generated minus costs). This framework should also integrate with a company's broader corporate performance management (CPM) framework.

Action Item: Define a strategy for strategic planning that incorporates top-down and bottom-up views. Establish a platform across the entire marketing department for marketing performance management, including database, data model and analytical tools. Implement a solution that supports strategic planning, including alignment with corporate goals, dashboards with key performance indicators and forecasting, and calendaring. Measure and predict ROI. Link it to CPM.

10. Voice of Customer/Community Marketing: Traditionally, marketing's role has been to "push" communications (offers, campaigns and promotions) at customers. An important
component of marketing's strategy will be to represent the voice of the customer. At a basic level, marketing does this by requesting customers to identify their preferences for customer contact (for example, opt-out/opt-in, channels of communication, products of interest) or through online surveys. As this concept expands, marketing will establish customer forums (live or online) and use social networking and blogs to capture customers' points of view. Marketing will need to identify not just processes for soliciting, obtaining and managing customer feedback but also will need to establish processes to ensure that they are consistently and appropriately leveraged for customer communications (marketing, sales and customer service).

Action Item: Identify appropriate channels for obtaining customer feedback. Leverage the power of the Internet, including online communities and blogs. Define processes for using that feedback across the organization, including for marketing campaigns, customer service calls, Web site visits and sales interactions.

Enjoy your Day

Your Loving Partner and Companion

DC*

Innovation is Simple and out of the Box

Dears,

It’s all about our customer experience (Business & IT Heads). They have great knowledge about their businesses–they can cite everything about their strategies, priorities, goals, and key metrics. They study their competitors meticulously, understanding their strategies and positioning. They study their markets, and the best study their customers. They have deep insight about everything in their industry.
But when I talk to them, a critical issue they always bring up is, “How do we innovate?” “How do we start thinking out of the box?”
One of the problems with innovating and thinking out of the box is that we are prisoners of our own experience. Most of us have long experiences in our industry. We’ve been working with our company a long time, we may have worked with one of our competitors, we may have worked with one of our customers. We go to “our trade shows,” we read “our trade magazines,” we have deep knowledge about our companies, industries and markets.
That’s part of what makes us effective as leaders and business professionals, but at the same time, it’s exactly what limits us. Our ideas and innovations are limited by this collection of past experiences. We “know” what works and what doesn’t work, never reconsidering ideas that were “bad” in the past. We look at what our competitors are doing, copying them, perhaps tweaking the idea to one up them. We turn the crank on the tried and true programs of the past, sharpening them, reshaping them..
So how do we escape this? It’s actually pretty easy, we need to look outside our own industries. We need to look in very different industries to see how they approach some of the issues that we face. For example, a few years ago, the executives of one of the leading high technology (B2B) companies met with the execs of an extreme sports company. It was an interesting picture, on one side of the conference room, a row of execs in neatly pressed khaki’s and blue shirts, on the other side, guys in board shorts, torn tee shirts, lots of body ink tatoos. Each eyed the other warily, some started looking “Who are these freaks?”
They started off with a session with a few key questions about their business models, key challenges, problems, and so forth. Gradually, they found they had a lot in common. All were struggling to grow their businesses. All were struggling to get new and innovative ideas. As they started to talk over different approaches, one of the exec’s said to his peers in his company, “They are doing something really interesting and different from what everyone does in our industry, if we co-opted their ideas, if we twisted them a little here and there, they would be really new and novel for our company!”
Soon everyone was discovering something “new.” It wasn’t “new” to the presenter, but to the others it was new and innovative–when adapted to their industry. Each side started seeing ideas presented from a source they never would have thought about before.
Innovation doesn’t have to be brand new and revolutionary. innovation can be artful adaptations of old ideas from very different industries and sources. Try looking outside your industry–not just to adjacent industries, but to widely separated groups. Try looking across generations–forget Gen Y–they are so old–look at kids. Try looking across national borders and cultures. Look at what other people do, how they handle similar issues, look at what you can learn and adapt from them. Share what you are doing, let them learn and adapt from you.
Innovation is simple, you just have to know where to look, how to listen, how to artfully co-opt and adapt .

Your Partner and Companion

DC*