FUTUREOF BENEFITS

·         Future of CRM:

CRM is here to stay and will evolve. The desire to improve customer satisfaction and retention of customers will constantly drive the need to improve CRM systems.

·         Economy is now driven by customers and not by sellers as in the past. There are different type of customers, different types of business models, and selling strategies. And it is a matter of time when there will be different types of CRM software to support these models.

·         Technology will improve to put more functionality tools in CRM applications as there is more demand for knowledge management systems, sales coaching systems, and service intelligence systems. Information today is in the form of maps, charts, and graphs generated by report writers and visual profiling programs. These will give way to voice activated and speech feed-back tools and other elaborate visual aids using 3-D and CAD style graphics.

Popular CRM's

Many versions of CRMs are now available in the CRM market. Open source enables any and every programmer to read, redistribute, and modify existing source codes to evolve a new software. Thus there is scope for rapid development. And thus various open source CRMs too have evolved. Some of the widely used open source CRMs are SugarCRM and vTiger.

SugarCRM

This is a commercial open source CRM suitable for companies of all sizes. The version 3.0 called the Sugar Suite has various functionalities like:

 

• Sales forecasting- The sales manager can calculate potential sales and associated revenues based on projections from sales representatives, thus have a better control over performance, commitment, achieving realistic goals, and planning resources.
• Campaign and Project Management- The campaign management tool allows users to organize marketing activities, manage and track marketing efforts on leads, contacts, and opportunities. The project management tool enables the users to define steps, establish timelines, and assign work to members on any project useful to end users.
• Email marketing- The marketing team creates the email templates, the recipients are listed and they are sent personalized email templates as per the planned schedule.
• Calendaring, call scheduling, planning meetings, note tracking-customizable dashboards for real time tracking of business activities
• New module called Sugar Collaborate added to Sugar Sales, Sugar Marketing and Sugar Support Suites, having specific tools like:
• Document Management capabilities like managing sales documentation, marketing collateral, customer incident reports
• Employee Directory- Customers can be searched by first or last names, roles, departments and basic contact information.
• Calendar Synchronization by project management, tasks and activities reminder

vTiger CRM

vTiger open-source CRM is most suitable for small and medium businesses. Originally built from source code of SugarCRM , it is based on open-source technologies like Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The distinct features are:

• Lead Management- This feature creates leads and then converts them to opportunities, it also imports leads from Web downloads, trade shows, seminars and direct mails.
• Opportunity and Contact Management- The user can track all sales opportunities, associate these with accounts, contacts, activities, and other modules. With other spreadsheet software the contacts and sales pipeline are analyzed and bottlenecks identified. The hierarchy of contacts are maintained to help deal with customers in a better way. More contacts are taken in from other applications like ACT, Goldmine etc.
• Account Management- The user can import accounts, export accounts, specify parent-child relationship between accounts, track all accounts, and attach customer specific documents to accounts for quick reference.
• Activity and Inventory management- With this feature the user can add all important customer related e-mails in vtiger CRM and store all the details of customer meetings and calls. This streamlines the sales process.
• Security management- This feature enables the organization to define the role of team members and give them access to modules as per their role. This feature also archives the login history of each user for auditing purposes.
• The Microsoft Outlook Plug-in feature permits adding outbound and forwarding inbound Outlook e-mails to vtiger CRM and synchronizes contacts, tasks, and calendar between the two. Another feature is to filter e-mails in Microsoft Outlook and retain the necessary e-mails to vtiger CRM.

Daffodil CRM

Daffodil CRM is a commercial CRM with features that

enable the software to integrate all aspects of customer life cycle that includes identifying business opportunities to retaining existing customer bank. It helps in automating everyday tasks and has features like:

• •  Printable reports and Export facility- The Daffodil software has Export to Excel and Printable reports facilites . The customizable view facility in the software generates the different views of data. The users are thus able to evaluate performance of their overall business, sales team, and products over a period of time. The users are also able to select fields, apply filters on each field by setting conditions and sort items by all available fields in ascending or descending order.
• •  Automatic mail attachment- This key feature attaches mails to Daffodil CRM automatically without manually selecting and sending each mail from email client. A forwarding rule on the webserver and the email client automatically attaches all email interactions with their corresponding leads.
• Campaign facility- The integrated email campaign facility features enables mass mailings to all or select category of customers. Users can compose mass mails with or without making use of email templates.
• Lead Management- The user can manage and analyze all leads with a single click. User can assign leads and keep a track on the progress made on leads by the executives. A single click will give the entire information related to the lead and also the latest five actions and interactions for quick followup and analysis of the lead.

CRM IMPLEMENTATION

  Implementation

To implement CRM, following factors need to be given due consideration:

• - Easy interaction between customers and company, enhancing quick response to customers' request and suggestions
• - Easy access to information about company like content of customization, advantages of the company, benefits doled out to the customers. This establishes profitable relationships with the customers based on mutual trust and respect
• - Abundant supply of customer information which have been accumulated and integrated from different channels
• - Grow with customers i.e. customers' information should be updated along with the passage of time
• - Have cordial relationship with other companies targeting the same customer segment. Thus giving relevant solution to customers' need and increasing acknowledgement to customers
• - Customers' information must be segmented to provide support for customization based on personalized information i.e. tailoring the company's product and services accordingly

Improvement in customer relationships increases customer loyalty, decreases customer turnover, increases sales revenue, and decreases marketing costs, thus increasing profit margins.

Company types that must adopt CRM

Companies that do not have repeat business from customers will not gain much from CRM. And also that have walk-in customers not providing multiple sales and service channels will not benefit much from CRM. Again if maintaining long term relationship with customer is not a priority for the company, it will be wise not to invest in CRM.

Then who benefits? The more the channels to access customers and more the number of touch points with customers, greater is the need for CRM installation. Companies in

• banking
• finance
• insurance
• airlines and hotels
• Telecommunications and health care benefit from installing CRM software.

CRM TYPES

Types of CRM

When it comes to application of CRM, three broad classifications are possible. They are:

• Operational CRM
• Analytical CRM
• Collaborative CRM

Operational CRM :

·         The operational application of CRM enables effective interaction with customers. For this purpose various tools are used. These contact management tools aim to reduce costs by improved process efficiency and use of media based communication channels. These are also aimed to provide customers with a consistent interface across all communication channels. To achieve this relevant customer data is collected and also displayed at all customer touch points. This is the customer master data. Another set of data where employees' contact with customers is also logged. This has information like topics discussed, customer requirements, soft customer data like hobbies, preferences, interests, details about children and other minor stuffs.

·         Banks are an exemplary implementation of CRM as customer contact management. Channel management tools aim to understand how customer interacts with the company. It aims to deliver products and services across multiple channels in effective, efficient, and consistent manner. Content management tools enable the company to manage what is visible to the customers i.e. what the customers are able to see when they interact with the company. The various processes undertaken are: campaign management, sales management, service management, and complaint management.

Analytical CRM:

The data collected in operational management is analyzed to segment customers. The valuable information thus obtained is used to satisfy customers. Analytical CRM is composed of:

1. Pattern discovery component
2. Product and customer analysis component
3. Multitude component
4. Sorting and customer fractionation component
5. Customer value evaluation component

Analytical solutions provided for most companies are integrated view of customer across all channels and applications, campaign performance analysis, customer profitability analysis, cross-selling and up selling. The analytical solutions help answer questions like:

1. Who are their best customers?
2. Whom they are likely to loose?
3. How to retain them?
4. How to attract new customers?
5. How to improve profitability of customers?

Examples are data warehousing, online analytical processing (OLAP), and data mining systems.

Note : Concept of customer segmentation : the value of customer is judged based on RFM analysis i.e. focusing on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value from customer purchasing data in retail business. Accordingly the customers are divided into various levels. The four main segments of customers are:

• At the top is the VIP customer whose expenditure is most and form 1% of all customers in a certain period.
• Then the main customer forming 5%.
• Next the ordinary customer forming 20%.
• And at the bottom is the scattered customer an overwhelming 80%.

The first three categories create more than 80% of all profits for the company and as a result they are differentiated as the best customers. They are the real targets of Customer Centralization.

Collaborative CRM:

The various departments of company like the sales, technical support, and marketing, share the information they collect about customers. The objective is to improve the quality of customer service and increase customer loyalty.

It allows the company to synchronize and manage efficient, productive interaction with customers, prospects, partners, and internal associates across all communication channels. The customers' viewpoint is taken care of at every transaction level thus enabling better service to the customer. Collaborative CRM also reduces web service costs by enabling web collaboration.