ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 36) TECHNOLOGY the products and services of participants in their business network in creative ways and leveraging each other’s market access and infrastructure. To create successful business networks, companies need to provide a 360-degree view of their suppliers, customer and employees. Doing this allows collaborative business networks to bring more innovation across products and processes than any individual company can. RON WEGMANN CEO, Vertical Solutions Our customers are starting to get a lot more savvy about targeting actionable information. It’s tempting to think that you need to collect lots of data on customers, but that approach is expensive, time consuming, and can bog down a CRM deployment. Rather than starting the CRM process with a brainstorming session to gather all of the information companies would like to have on their customers, they are starting to approach a CRM deployment by identifying the business processes that aren’t working optimally. These can range the gamut from having to open multiple applications to guide a customer through a specific process — such as one application to capture the customer call and create a “ticket,” another one to process a return or a warranty repair, and another one to authorize a charge on a credit card — to inefficient use of a mobile worker’s time. The companies that we find are achieving success are pinpointing the information they need to support business processes. For example, one of our customers that provides warranty support realized that too many of its customers’ support agreements were lapsing. The reason? They didn’t have a handle on which customers’ contracts were expiring and when. Accessing that data enabled the company to proactively contact its customers and ensure that their coverage did not expire. It also enabled the company to exponentially increase its warranty contract revenues. M Highlights of What’s New With CRM Software WE ASKED A NUMBER OF CRM SOFTWARE COMPANIES ABOUT THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS WITH THEIR TOOLS. THE FOLLOWING IS A SYNOPSIS OF WHAT THEY SHARED WITH US. CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT INSIGHT What are the most important new characteristics of the latest version of your CRM software? JAMES NORWOOD, Vice President of Product Marketing, Epicor This year, Epicor’s largest CRM initiative was the release of Epicor Information Worker (IW). Epicor IW [provides] contextual access in real time to all the information in the underlying enterprise software system. And it does so in a familiar environment through desktop productivity tools like Microsoft Office. It enables all users — even those who are not traditionally users of the core [enterprise resource planning (ERP)] system to access and take action on pertinent information such as orders, returns, shipments, support cases, and so on, in the context of a particular contact or customer. SANDRA DOROSZ, Vice President, Nitro Logic The most important new characteristic of the latest version [of Nitro Logic’s Nitro CRM] is that it provides freedom from Internet slowdowns. Fast-paced environments have not embraced the benefits of ondemand systems as much as sales departments due to the performance degradation experienced when the Internet slows down. Unlike a corporate network, no one can control the Internet. In addition, more and more call centers would like to shift to a virtual model, by allowing agents to work at home. This again leaves the agent at the mercy of the Internet. Nitro CRM automatically switches from • JOE FLEISCHER is Chief Technical Editor at ICMI. joef@icmi.com. icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 36 http://www.icmi.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.