An Overview of CRM tools

Abstract

The article gives an overview of the CRM tools. It starts with defining a CRM
tool/software and explaining the goal of CRM tools. Then it describes the need for
companies to go for CRM tool. The article further explains classifications of CRM
tools, along with business benefits provided by CRM tools. Next it lists down top
CRM vendors and explains Amdocs Clarify CRM. Lastly the article explains how to
measure success of CRM implementation.

Defining A CRM tool/software

CRM software is an essential piece of equipment for any company or organization
that wants to achieve the maximum return on their marketing and fully capitalize
on their sales leads and prospects. CRM tools helps organisations to cultivate
ongoing, lifetime relationships with their current and established customers.

By integrating all data about sales leads, current customers, associated companies,
and employees throughout the various departments, CRM software enables
enterprises to seamlessly handle marketing, sales, and customer service as a single
package. In simpler words it's a way for salespeople to make a plan and then work
on that plan.

CRM software is not only employed for retention and handling of existing
customers, but it as well comes into play from the very first contact with the
prospect, sales lead, or new order. By automating the process of funnelling these
contacts through the sales pipeline, the software streamlines the handling of these
accounts and ensures that far fewer get lost in the shuffle of day to day business.
Call backs and new mailings can be scheduled and coordinated automatically, with
much less risk of human error. Data from phone inquiries can be captured and
stored automatically. Customer order histories and price points are stored for use
in planning future marketing campaigns and for determining proper levels of
customer support.

Goal of CRM tool

The idea of CRM tool is that it helps businesses use technology and human
resources to gain insight into the behavior of customers and the value of those
customers. With an effective CRM strategy, a business can increase revenues by:
  Providing services and products that are exactly what your customers
want

 Offering better customer service

 Cross selling products more effectively

 Helping sales staff close deals faster

 Retaining existing customers and discovering new ones

Need For a CRM tool

“The success of your business depends on the way you treat your customers”. This
is one fact that many of us need to live with. But how do you treat your customers
in the right way? That’s what CRM solutions are in place for. Each customer is a
different individual with different likes, dislikes and behavioural patterns. As a
business, it is extremely important that you keep a tag on all this to ensure that
you treat the customer in the best possible way.

Next comes how your business can achieve a continued growth. Two fundamental
elements of continued growth that many firms overlook are the lifetime value of
existing customers, and the importance of retaining them. For most businesses
and other organizations, the costs associated with acquiring new customers or a
client is very high. In fact, for many companies, getting new customers is the
single largest expense they incur. Convincing a sceptical public that your firm can
meet their needs, and do it better than competing firms, is a tall order. Doing so
requires spending large sums on advertising, branding, marketing, and a sales
force. Most salespeople quit after the first contact, not because they don't want
to follow-up, it’s just that they can't remember! So, knowing that it, over average,
takes 8-12 contacts to close the sale, how much is a company wasting by having
their salespeople do one call on a prospect when they KNOW it will take more. In
contrast, your existing customers have already demonstrated a willingness to
spend money on your product or service, and they are far more likely to do so in
the future than someone who's never done business with you in the past.

Satisfied customers who return again and again to use a company's product or
service are the foundation of a long-term future for any business. The key to
retaining their loyalty is successfully managing your company's relationship with
them, and CRM software is essential to this goal. By making each customer feel
valued, and demonstrating respect for their decision to utilize your products or
services, a bond of loyalty is forged which draws the customer back again and
again. Automated customer relationship management software makes it much
easier and simpler to manage contacts, inquiries, customer service requests, new
orders, etc., from current customers. Besides customer retention, gains in
efficiency from utilizing CRM software can also lower the overall costs of handling
these various functions.

Classification of various CRM tools

CRM tools can be classified as:

 Operational CRM – It provides support to front office business processes

such as sales personnel, marketing and service staff. All sorts of exchanges
and communications are stored in customer contact history. Therefore the
staff members can easily retrieve necessary customer information.
Generally it has a range of purposes like:
• Sales force automation
• Sales management system
• Enterprise marketing automation &
• Managing campaigns

 Analytical CRM – It evaluates the necessary customer data for a wide variety
of reasons and purposes like:
• Designing and accomplishing target marketing campaigns.
• Designing and accomplishing cross selling, up selling and customer
acquisition.
• Identifying customer behaviours regarding products and services i.e.
product development and pricing.
• Management information system i.e. financial forecasting.

 Collaborative CRM – It basically covers various aspects of the organization

such as sales department, technical support and marketing staff. The
amazing aspect about this too is that it would combine all the departments
of an organization in a collaborative manner. It allows interaction between
customer and company. This type is commonly used in B2B businesses.

 Sales Intelligence CRM - It is known as a direct sales tool, which is similar to

Analytical CRM. Usually it has a variety of features like:
• Cross-selling/Up-selling/Switch-selling opportunities
• Customer drift
• Sales performance
• Customer trends
• Customer margins
• Customer alignment
  Campaign Management CRM - It includes the features and elements of both
Operational and Analytical CRM. It has a variety of procedures like:
• Target groups are generally synchronized from the customer base
according to selected criteria.
• Emailing, telephone, SMS and post
• Tracking, storing and analyzing campaign statistics

 Portal-based CRM – Brings all systems together so that employees can view
all systems as needed

However any CRM application software can be broadly divided into five areas

 Customer interaction management

 Customer decision support

 Systems integration

 Customer information management

 Workflow

The Figure 1 illustrates the various five areas of CRM.

Benefits to business provided by CRM tools

Customer relationship management tools have been shown to help companies

attain these objectives:

 Streamlined sales and marketing processes – Use of customised automated

tool for sales and marketing function of an organisation results in lowering
on human dependency, thus increasing the process effectiveness.
 Higher sales productivity
 Added cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
 Improved customer service, loyalty, and retention
 Increased call center efficiency
 Higher close rates
 Better customer profiling and targeting
 Reduced expenses
 Increased market share
 Higher overall profitability

Vendors of CRM tools

There are several vendors who provide CRM tools to the organisations which vary
from traditional proprietary tools to internet based CRM and opensource. Based on
the Gartner’s report in 2007, Let us have a look at some top CRM vendors:

1. Amdocs CRM v.6

2. Entellium
3. Epiphany
4. Frontrange Solutions
5. Maximizer Software
6. Microsoft
7. Onyx
8. Netsuite
9. Oracle
10. Pivotal
11. Salesforce.com
12. SAP

Right CRM tool for your Business

When it comes down to CRM Tools, the choices available can be a daunting task.
On the one hand, it's the tendency of management to have a robust; more
reporting you could ever need, grow into CRM Software program with all the bells
and whistles. The problem with these systems is that the more difficult you make
it for the salespeople to use, the more trouble you are asking for when it's time to
buy into using the software.

The most important thing is to make sure that you involve the line in the decision
making in the early stages. Have a meeting and ask them what features would
make their jobs easier in their next CRM Software. This doesn't have to be a long
drawn out meeting, but you need to convey to the people that will be using the
software on a day to day basis that you are going to pick a software program that
fits their needs, but also the needs of management. In other words, it's going to
be a win/win for the whole group.

But, as far as making the decision, it really depends on what the primary needs of
your salespeople are. The real value of CRM Software is for the salespeople, and
too often they are left out of the process. If your salespeople are pure business
developers and they handle leads such that account managers close deals, then
you need to equip them with solid lead management software without too many
bells and whistles. If you are using the software for customer service
representatives, you want to give them a solution that is easy to understand. Let's
face it, it's a nice thought to have a customer service rep use all the features in a
CRM Software but don't overwhelm them. Have your programmer give them
limited screens to work through and then add more as they progress. The last
thing you want to do is overwhelm them with a robust contact management
solution, run them through a 4 hour training session, and then have them lost in
the software program. Start slow, add more, and then tweak as needed.

Let us now look at one CRM tool on the aspects of key strengths, positioning,
Implementation and pricing model.

Amdocs CRM:
A global company with revenue of more than $2 billion in fiscal 2005, Amdocs has
approximately 15,000 employees and serves customers in more than 50 countries
around the world.

The company's broad portfolio of integrated CRM products includes billing, CRM,
self service, order management, mediation, and content revenue management.
Over the last three years alone, Amdocs has invested more than $390 million in the
development of their product portfolio. The company's products are built with
standards-based technology and open architecture to ensure they fit seamlessly
into any environment. In addition to a broad range of CRM software, Amdocs offers
comprehensive support services including: consulting services, implementation,
learning, software support, managed services and outsourcing. Over the last 22
years, Amdocs has built a global customer base of industry leaders by developing
lasting relationships and delivering real business results.
The Amdocs has a packaged CRM suite called “Amdocs ClarifyCRM”. Clarify CRM
can be described below.

Amdocs ClarifyCRM helps companies increase business performance and maximize

the return on their CRM investment. The Amdocs ClarifyCRM Release 11 delivers
new advanced browser-based applications, simplifies legacy system integration and
enhances business process management. It is the only CRM product in the market
that delivers advanced architecture enabling co-existence between browser-based
and classic client server applications. This unique co-existence architecture
allows companies to move from a client-server environment toward the use of
web-based CRM applications and technology at a pace that is right for their
business, helping them manage their Amdocs ClarifyCRM implementations and
resources more effectively. Amdocs ClarifyCRM's co-existence architecture also
enables companies to operate CRM functions from beyond the main call center via,
for example: agents, points of sale and web-based self service.

In addition to Billing Manager generally available in Release 11, Amdocs enables

companies to deliver improved customer satisfaction and workforce efficiency via
pre-built, seamless integration.

ClarifyCRM provides following features:

 Built-in problem escalation procedures

 Automated management of service level agreements (SLAs) and related
contracts
 Real-time service request monitoring
 Parts ordering
 Activity history tracking and reporting
 E-support/Web-based self-service for routine support requests

Success measurement of CRM implementation

Success measurement of CRM implementation is critical and has to be included in
the CRM adoption framework as well. Every organisation implementing CRM has to
set measurable, specific CRM objectives and monitor indicators/candidates for
successful measurement. Absence of clear and well-working performance
indicators in the CRM results' analysis may lead to CRM project to be failed.
Measurement system might be a metric that provides the feedback mechanism for
continuous development of strategy. These metrics have an internal and external
focus and link operations to strategy and corporate benefits. Moreover, metrics
can be viewed as a hierarchical structural measurement that each level has to
follow. These hierarchical structural measurement is designed unique at each level
depend on the purpose and the user. There are two primary challenges in
developing CRM metrics, i.e. understanding the linkage points between the levels
and avoiding over-complex and over-simplified internal and external measure of
CRM success and failure.
One way to measure success is the achievement of strategic objective set prior to
the implementation process. In the IT project management methodology, the
project overall goal and measure of success is referred to as the project’s
measurable organisational value (MOV). The Figure 2 illustrates the IT value
chain.

Figure 2: The IT value chain

It is clear from Figure 2 that an organisational goal defines an organisational

strategy and project MOV support organisational strategy. This mapping shows how
a project’s goal aligns with an organisation’s strategy and goal. Then, at the last
step of project, the project's actual achievements can be compared to its initial
MOV to determine whether the project was successful. If the project is successful
(it either met or exceeded its MOV), the project will explicitly support the
organisation.
There are six basic steps in developing project’s MOV. The first step is identifying
desired area of impact of the project. The sample of impacts are summarised in
Table 1.
 Table 1: Impacts of CRM projects
Source:"CRM Adoption Framework and Its Success Measurement" 2008 by L W Santoso,
Petra Christian University

The final step is making MOV summary in a clear, concise statement. MOV
summary will provide an important chance to get final agreement and verification;
provide a simple and clear direction for the project team; and set explicit
expectations for all project stakeholders. The example of MOV is described in
Table 2.

Table 2: Sample MOV

Source:"CRM Adoption Framework and Its Success Measurement" 2008 by L W Santoso,
Petra Christian University

Conclusion

Any CRM solution definitely helps in increasing the customer retention and
streamlines the processes of sales and marketing functions. But it is also important
to choose right kind of CRM tool based on your business needs and capabilities.
 References

1. Source:"CRM Adoption Framework and Its Success Measurement" 2008 by L

W Santoso, Petra Christian University
2. What is CRM?
http://www.elitecrmsoftware.com/what_is_crm_software.html retrieved
on 10 Jan 10.
3. Types of CRM http://www.crmscorecard.com/types-of-crm.htm retrieved
on 10 Jan 10.
4. Top CRM vendors http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/news/1249200/Top-15-
CRM-vendors-emerging-trends-revealed# retrieved on 10 Jan10.
5. Amdocs Clarify http://crm.ittoolbox.com/topics/pack-apps/clarify/
retrieved on 10 Jan10.
6. Amdocs ClarifyCRM - 'Coexistence Architecture
http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/19004.html retrieved on 11th Jan 10.