IMT NAGPUR

Recent Developments in CRM and PolarisNet

A Report for the subject CRM

2/10/2012

Done ByJay Shankar Nimit Bhatia. Emilie Lavigne Lavanya K Mehrotra Kushal Dugar Mudit Srivastav Raman Yadav Kiran Karkera Prateek Mehra

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, is a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by solidifying customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. True CRM brings together information from all data sources within an organization (and where appropriate, from outside the organization) to give one, holistic view of each customer in real time. This allows customer facing employees in such areas as sales, customer support, and marketing to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to target marketing strategies to competitive positioning tactics. Recent CRM Activities & learnings in the business world. Event CRM Idol 2011 organized in America: CRM Idol, launched for the first time in 2011. the idea of this competition was to give exposure to small CRM-related technology vendors who had little or no exposure. most of the small companies that participated had spent their entire (limited) budget on development. Be smart: Always allocate some of your time and budget for presence, not just product. Cooperation is better than shark-like competition. Those that were cooperative and competed on the strength of what they had to offer were the ones that did the best. Be a bit creative and show your human side. Those approaches stood out because they showed a human public face for the companymaking them easy to relate to. Net Promoter Creator to Release Social Media Measurement Tool: Satmetrix, the creator of the Net Promoter customer loyalty score, unveiled its social media measurement tool, SparkScore. The solution will rate brands on a negative 100 to 100 scale and categorize customers as "detractors," "passives," or "promoters." SparkScore's findings are based on comments in social media, customer reviews, and discussion forums that are interpreted via an algorithm that Satmetrix has developed with the sentiment analysis firm Metavana. SparkScore's engine measures referrals and comments that are free from traditional surveys and improves the human level of accuracy. Companies planning to leverage the customer applications in the cloud.
o

The Right Approach to Cloud Integration (Informatica) Cloud-based Customer Service CRM: Best Practices for Success (eGain) True Cloud Contact Center

With its universal acceptance as an IT option, subscription revenues from cloud computing are projected to reach $150 billion worldwide by 2013. Companies who dont have Cloud integration will be seriously considering that option as they seek to upgrade or add solutions in the future.

Customer Service Gets Smart with Artificial Intelligence: Customer support is a steep financial investment but critically important to bolster customer loyalty and satisfaction. The cost of customer care is generally rising alongside the complexity of IT. The big challenge in automating customer service is maintaining cost control. This offers a multicare solution using multiple forms of AI technologies to provide a new, faster, and simpler user interface in mobile apps and on the Web. As a real person in a call center can handle many types of problems and test several methods of solving a problem fast, a smart customer care solution needs to be able to do the same.

The AI technology is an incredible asset for customer relationship management and customer care solutions. AI technology is able to mimic a customer care agent with services like virtual assistants, humanlike recommendations, and high precision search. Smart customer care able to handle a large part of customer queries, it is now possible to align the organization with more sophisticated services as a result. 10 Features to Look for in a CRM Solution In an effort to assist with the decision to purchase a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program, the top 10 features that many organizations search for in a CRM solution. This "at-a-glance" list provides a quick reference guide. 1. Sales Cycle Analysis 2. Back-office accounting system integration 3. Open, industry-standard technology 4. Seamless information flow between corporate systems and remote employees 5. Real-time reporting and analysis 6. Automated workflow 7. Contact and campaign management 8. Multiple language and multicurrency capabilities to support local business 9. Ability to easily customize your solution to fit your business needs 10. Scalability to accommodate future business growth

Some CRM conversion of Traditional CRM Vendors to recent Integration Buzzient: Offers a CRM platform that provides social media analytics that can be used for web marketing, customer tracking, or reporting. They have partnerships with Salesforce, Oracle, and SugarCRM. NetSuite: Offers social CRM with a partnership with InsideView and has Twitter integration. Oracle Siebel Social CRM: Promises the ability to provide insights based on the buying behaviors of similar customers, as well as shared content to be used between sales teams. Salesforce: Offers access to Social Networking like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce, like SAP is importing the Twitter firehose feed, and has offered social features like Q&A, and social networking like Chatter, and has lightweight LinkedIn integration. Jive Software: Community Engagement, offers data integration from Radian6, encouraging management of the discussion. The software offers built in integration with Salesforce, Lithium Technologies offers the Social CRM Suite offering features such as Community Applications, Reputation Engine, Actionable Analytics, CRM Connectivity, and Social Web Connectivity.

RightNow CRM: Offers several features in their suite such as Support Communities, Innovation Communities, Cloud Monitoring, and Social Experience Design. Rightnow recently acquired Hivelive an enterprise community platform. CRM Applications and Plugins Appirio: Offers the ability for companies to create applications on Facebook which then marry data back to Salesforce, called Cloud Connectors. SocialCRMTools: Offers integration with Salesforce that imports, monitors, and manages Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Concourse: Offers a variety of integration modules to a variety of apps, including a CRM module thats prebuilt.

POLARISNET
Polaris Net Sdn. Bhd. is a technology solutions and services company. Our business focus lies in 3 key areas: Business Management Solutions, Technology Consulting and Turnkey Software Development. We deliver solutions that help businesses achieve greater productivity and information visibility; using methodologies that help solve complex business problems whilst ensuring business sustainability. With the benefits of local expertise that is guided by the stringent delivery standards in each consulting engagement, our solutions are practical and have been proven to create tangible business value. Our track record of includes successes with various organisations which includes SMEs, MultiNational Corporations (MNCs) and public listed companies in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia and the UK. These engagements include deploying our business management solutions, advisory work and turnkey software development amongst other service disciplines. Polaris Net serves a client base that spans various industries and sizes; from trading companies to education institutions and from Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to public listed companies. We have successfully created value for our clients that are located in Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia and the UK. Our consultants are equipped with the experience of having successfully carried out assignments for a diverse set of industries. Among the industries that we have served are:

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT Overview Polaris CRM is a full-featured, web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution. It addresses the challenges faced in acquiring and retaining sales by helping businesses create high-value relationships with its customers; maximising the value of customers over their lifetime. Polaris CRM features full Internet-Capabilities with easy-to-use yet powerful functionality; providing vital information and analysis to improve customer understanding. It empowers employees to work effectively and independently, whilst encouraging collaboration among them, ultimately leading to better customer service. Features Access Accurate, Real-Time Info Query accurate, real-time data and alter information with ease using an integrated, high performance SQL database. Unparalleled Mobility Full Internet capability delivered via thin -client architecture allows users to work from virtually any locations at any time via a web browser. Dashboards & Reporting Tools Summaries of information, KPIs and management reports are presented using dashboards, making it easier to find and react to business triggers.

Automation of Business Processes Advanced workflow engine allows automation of business processes while eliminating information redundancy. Scalability Robust to meet current needs; scalable to match business' growth. Integration Seamless integration with solutions from other vendors.

SUPPORTWORKS
Supportworks is an issue tracking system designed for use in help desk and information Technology (IT) environments. Two branches of the software are developed concurrently, Supportworks ITSM, a certified Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) compatible IT service management (ITSM) solution,[4] and Supportworks Helpdesk Professional.[3] Issues tracked in Supportworks are known as "calls." Calls are classified using a hierarchical model known as "problem profiles." This model enables a drill down method to classify calls with each level increasing specificity of the classification. Supportworks groups analysts into "support groups." Calls may be assigned to a support group, or to a specific analyst.[3] A call's state at any given time is denoted by one of several different "condition codes," each is expressed visually by a different color.[3] Black indicates a pending state (that work is in progress on the call) or that the call is "closed" (required work is completed). Blue denotes a call that no one currently has responsibility for; that it has not been "assigned" to or "accepted" by an analyst. Green colored calls are "on hold," meaning further user input is required to complete the call and therefore "paused" for a specific amount of time. Red is reserved for calls that are "off hold" or that require urgent attention.[1] Each Supportworks call is associated with a service level agreement (SLA). A call's SLA can be generated from its metadata, such as the customer, department, site, inventory item, or problem profile associated with the call. Each SLA incorporates a "response time" and "fix time" related to the call. Triggers are programed based on the response time and fix time to ensure the SLA is not violated. For instance, if a call is approaching its fix time, but its issue has not been resolved, a help desk manager can be notified, the call can be transferred to a different group, or the call's condition code can be changed.[3] Supportworks provides a tool to track widespread incidents that may impact a variety of customers known as "issues." Calls can be associated with an issue and closed en masse when an issue has been corrected. Closing such an issue generates an email notification to all customers affected. When an analyst opens the Supportworks client, they are presented with a "Supportworks Today" page displaying, among other things, a list of the current issues. Supportworks provides an integrated knowledge base application, e-mail integration through a shared mailbox, and the ability to populate a database of customers from external sources such as directory services using LDAP, query results from external databases, CSV files and Excel documents.[3][4] The forms used to manage information in Supportworks can be customized

with a graphical form designer tool. Additional fields can be added to the Supportworks database to support such customizations when necessary.[3] Supportworks is packaged with a web-based self-service portal, allowing customers to create calls in the system using a web browser, without requiring assistance from an analyst. When a customer creates a call through the self-service portal an email is generated with a reference number for the customer. The reference number allows them to track the progress of their call through the portal. Through this interface they are able to escalate their call, update their call, attach files to their call, and see which analyst is working on their call.[3][4] Supportworks can work with or independently of a complementary Hornbill product, Assetworks.[3] Assetworks is an inventory control system and can be used to track any arbitrary set of items. It contains a discovery feature, however, which allows it to auto-populate an inventory by autodetecting devices connected to a computer network.[5]

References:
www.sugarcrm.com/crm/mobile-crm www.sugarcrm.com/crm/social-crm www.destinationcrm.com/BestPractices/ www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/CRM-News/Daily-News/Customer-Interaction-withUtilities-via-Social-Media-Is-on-the-Rise-80243.aspx: www.polarisnet.com.my
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supportworks