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n can determine which marketing campaigns and offers
to target to which specific customers, how to design new products and services to
meet customers’ additional or changing needs, how to best provide service and
support, and how to reward and express appreciation to the organization’s best
customers.
Industry-Specific Functionality
Regardless of the amount of prebuilt functionality a CRM application offers,
enterprises typically develop supplemental functionality so that their CRM solution
fits their unique business processes and needs. The degree to which they must do
so, however, depends largely on the number of unique requirements they have and
the amount of prebuilt functionality an application offers. Accordingly,
organizations should select applications that offer extensive prebuilt functionality to
support the business processes for their particular industry. By scrutinizing the
prebuilt functionality available in a vendor’s offering, organizations can avoid
needless costs associated with reinventing the wheel.
Scalability and Global Support
Many employees throughout an organization, including personnel in sales,
marketing, customer service, and back-office functions, use CRM applications. In
addition, increasingly large numbers of customers interact with these applications
through online self-service channels. And, in the case of employee relationship
management applications, the user base might include every member of the
workforce. CRM applications, therefore, must be highly scalable and flexible
enough to be delivered any way users prefer—in both hosted and on-premise
versions, or in any combination.
In addition to scalability, CRM applications must also provide multilingual,
multicurrency support as well as support for multiple time zones. With this
support, global organizations can implement the applications in multiple languages
while maintaining a single, unified repository of customer data across the different
languages. This allows organizations, for example, to consolidate sales forecasting
information across different global regions and to analyze data regardless of the
language of the underlying customer interactions.
Why CRM? The Business Case for Customer Relationship Management Page 11
Flexible Deployment Options
Companies of all sizes utilize CRM technology to better meet the needs of their
customers. As CRM initiatives expand across regions, functions, channels and
markets, CRM vendors have introduced a variety of deployment options including
web hosted, private hosted, on premise and combinations thereof. The selection of
the correct deployment option is critical to the success of CRM within an
organization. The table below provides some key insights to consider when
selecting a deployment option including functionality, deployment timeframe,
available IT resources, budget and attitudes toward outsourcing.
Prefer to maintain
complete control of
applications and
infrastructure on-site
Security, service and
compliance of utmost
importance & currently
outsource or considering
outsourcing
Currently outsource or
are considering
outsourcing
Outsourcing
Attitudes
Have allocated capital
budget for hardware and
software
No capital budget
required for hardware,
only for software licenses
Monthly subscription can
be funded out of
o