• How-to

What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a collection of important business tools that help organizations in competing effectively, by managing the full lifecycle of customer acquisition and renewal/attrition.

CRM is not an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price; it is a differentiator. If your competition is doing the same thing you are (as is most of the times), enhancements in product and reductions in price don’t give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it’s a stickier and more sustainable relationship in the long haul.

The goal of CRM is to provide a complete view of the customer experience with the organization. When an organization understands all the interactions that form the customer experience, it gains important information about its customers’ needs. The organization can then use this information to be more effective at meeting customers’ current and future needs. It can also identify customers whose needs cannot be met profitably.

Choosing the CRM
The key to CRM success is basing technology decisions on a careful definition of the business requirements, the business need, pain or problem, and the functionality required to solve that problem.

There are certain factors that you should consider when selecting a CRM so that it is well-aligned with your business practices and customer approach.

Know your requirements: When choosing your CRM technology, there’s simply no substitute for allowing a structured list of requirements to dictate your technology decisions. Always remember, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency,” says Bill Gates.

The key question to ask when defining necessary functionality is, what aspect of our customer-focused processes do we need to support with technology? For that you have to define your functional requirements.

After you’ve defined functional requirements, give each one a numerical score that rates its importance to the business goal. Then you’re ready to map the functions to the candidate technologies by answering the question, is there a CRM tool that can perform each of these core functions?

Are you prepared to change your process to match the tool’s workflow or is the CRM flexible enough to accommodate your process?

By scoring specific functions, you can compare a product’s strengths and weaknesses against your most critical business requirements.

Cost: Your financial capabilities are an important consideration. The size of your business, present number of users, and future plans will have a bearing on the cost of the software and the total cost of ownership.

Compare vendors for the one-time cost of software and the TCO over a period of time. In most situations small businesses are much better off with the SaaS/Hosted CRM option where they pay only for what they use and have little or zero upfront investment.

Usability: This is a factor that can make or break CRM adoption within a company. A CRM system that facilitates intuitive navigation, entering of data and access to information with minimum number of clicks ensures user acceptability. Employee training is a cost and the process can drag if your CRM system of choice requires that your employees have to grapple with tabs and functions they are not used to. Do check the extent of training support provided by the vendor.

Vendor analysis: Once you have your requirements sorted out, you can compare vendors in an objective manner. Armed with a prioritized list of requirements you can assess, select or eliminate vendors without wasting undue time on the process.
The vendor should be assessed on two counts: technology and fitness for long-term business relationship. Your vendor should offer an evaluation copy of its software so your CRM team can install and use the product and verify that the promised functionality actually exists; ensure that the product works in your specific technical environment.

Gauge the product’s usability. Likewise, ensure that the tool can work with your data. If you have legacy data, do ensure that importing it into your new system doesn’t pose large technical challenges as that can increase the total cost significantly. Selecting a CRM solution can be a difficult task but given the benefits that follow the successful implementation of a correctly-chosen CRM, it is well worth the effort. So, do your research, be well-informed, compare and ask questions.

What’s here in India?
In India many companies are offering CRM services to their clients like Sage Software India Private Limited offering their CRM system in on-premise and partner hosted versions, PK4 Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd is offering Impel Hosted CRM, Net4India Ltd. is offering Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM in Hosted platform. Also, some open source options are available in the market like Sugar CRM and Zoho CRM.

©Entrepreneur May 2011

Rajesh V. Majji is GM, Product Development & Engineering, Net4 India Ltd.

Tags:
business, CRM, customer relationship management, Impel, Microsoft, Net4India, PK4 software Technologies, rajesh v majji, requirement, sugar crm, TCO, Technology, zoho crm