▼ Is ''Relationship Starvation'' Choking Consumer-Driven CRM Success?
By Jason Compton
Source: destination CRM

Companies must look beyond cost containment to forge stronger links with end customers.

In a world of tight supply integration and intricate business-to-business networks, have consumers become lost in the shuffle, a forgotten hot potato better avoided than handled? Or is there hope for intimate B2C relationships beyond the intermediation of self-service and outsourcing?

▼ The envelope please -- ISM picks CRM software standouts  
By Barney Beal
Source: SearchCRM.com    

As further evidence that small and midsized businesses are garnering more of the CRM market's attention, ISM added a second category to its annual list of the top 15 CRM software packages.

The Bethesda, Md.-based consultancy announced the winners Wednesday, doubling the number of vendors it usually recognizes.  

Barton Goldenberg, ISM's co-founder and president, said that not all companies need the enterprise-level functionality offered by vendors like Siebel Systems Inc., PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP AG. He predicted market growth of 10% to 15% this year in CRM software sales and suggested that much of that will come in the small and midsized business (SMB) space. (Read more...)
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▼ Is CRM Innovation Dead?
By Joe Outlaw
Source: CRM Daily 

Integration and interoperability are areas where many vendors are working on new solutions. Some are based on new architectures, some based on component assembly, and some based on technologies, such as Web services.   

The CRM  applications market is maturing, and it seems the speed of change has slowed dramatically over the past year to 18 months. Have the small vendors stopped innovating? Or have they all been acquired -- or their ideas been co-opted -- by the larger vendors?

Has the economy squeezed all of the R&D money out of the market? Or are we poised for a new round of innovation? If the latter, what are the hot new areas to watch? (Read more...)
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▼ CRM Vendors Court Elusive Mid-Market
By Denis Pombriant
Source: CRMBuyer.com

What many refer to as the mid-market is really the mainstream, the large concentration of buyers that wait until a technology has proven its business worth before spending their relatively small budgets. Geoffrey Moore explained all of this in his landmark book, Crossing the Chasm, and we've been getting it wrong ever since. 

One unifying attribute of this year's CRM  user group meetings has been the emphasis many vendors are placing on the so-called mid-market. In announcements that coincide with these meetings, Siebel, SAP and PeopleSoft have made efforts to announce products for this segment, and more announcements are expected as other user groups convene. But rather than clarifying vendors' positions, this focus on the mid-market might cause problems for vendors and customers alike. (Read more...)
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▼ SMBs Are Adopting Right-Size CRM
By Jason Compton
Source: destination CRM

Smaller companies are finally providing a long-expected boost in CRM adoption rates, but curbing overall IT-spending growth.

In a new report, "CRM For Small to Medium Business," Datamonitor projects that the CRM market for small and midsize businesses will grow at nearly three times the pace of the overall market. This represents a 17.2 percent compounded annual growth rate between now and 2008, compared to 6.5 percent for the entire CRM industry. That growth will see SMB share of CRM business expand from less than 17 percent in 2003, to more than 27 percent in 2008.

Projecting big gains among smaller businesses is a frequently repeated element of the pop psychology of the CRM business. Indeed, considering that in the mid-to-late 1990s sophisticated CRM capabilities were virtually unheard of in large enterprises, there is some truth to the repetition. "Penetration rates are [still] lower among SMBs, but now there are products that appeal to SMBs [on price]," says Evan Kirchheimer, a Datamonitor analyst. It took years for CRM vendors to live up to the promise of the market and provide nearly the same capabilities enterprises enjoyed at a small fraction of the cost. "I don't think those solutions existed prior to the Internet bubble bursting." (Read more...) 1204
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▼ Mobile CRM Is on the Go
By Jason Compton
Source: destination CRM 

▼ Outsourcing Customer Satisfaction
By Elizabeth Millard
Source: CRM Buyer

Yankee Group analyst Phil Fersht told CRM Buyer that a great deal of hypocrisy revolves around businesses' decisions to outsource their help desks. "Companies talk about wanting to provide good customer service, but they're more concerned about cutting costs right now," he said. "Also, some companies get on their high horse and say they don't outsource to overseas companies, yet they outsource to companies that do."

As part of cost-cutting measures, more companies are offshoring their tech-support divisions. Customers of companies like Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, AOL and Dell regularly route their calls to overseas help desks, often located in India.

Although training is available for these offshore personnel, many customers have grown unhappy with the communication issues that arise across continents, sparking a backlash that threatens to worsen. (Read more...)
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▼ Does Access to Real-Time Data Make a Difference in Customer Profitability?
By Richard Fiorella, President , Quantum AI Corp.
Source: destinationCRM

There's no substitute for real-time information in decision-making.

You may have heard this story, or one very much like it. It begins several years ago when a forward-thinking company deployed a team of consultants to find out about their customers. The results were ready in six months, business plans were written in the following quarter, budget approval was gained, and new processes were deployed the following year. Tremendous profits were forecast. Instead of greater profitability, however, that same forward-thinking company nearly closed its doors a short time later. How could that happen? The effects of time. By the time the company was able to act on the information it had so meticulously collected in its data warehouse, the marketplace had shifted.

The moral of the story is, there's no substitute for real-time information in decision-making.  

But aggregating customer data in real-time across multiple applications, platforms, systems, and entire organizations can be more difficult than herding cats--and the costs don't stop after the consulting firms leave, unless you come at it from another angle. (Read more...)
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▼ Poor Call Center Technology Can Impact Customer Loyalty
By Joshua Weinberger  
Source: destination CRM

Working systems are as important as agents to delivering superior service.

Call center agents are not always customers' first point of contact. For companies that use an IVR, the technology can make or break an interaction.

Most contact centers use one-dimensional metrics like time-to-respond or number-of-calls-handled to gauge success or failure. That's simply not sophisticated enough, according Frank Moreno, director of contact center solutions at Empirix, which hosted a customer event to discuss best practices for monitoring call center technologies. (Read more...)