CRM - December 2007 - (Page 25)

“You’re expecting to get business value out of them, and that’s just what they’re expecting to get out of you. The companies who lead will be the ones who come forward with customer engagement tools—providing businesses with the tools to engage us.” changing channels For many customers, the manufacturer or developer of a product isn’t the main contact. Integrators, resellers, partners, and the like—collectively known as the indirect channel—mean more to such customers, and should therefore mean more to the vendor. 2007 brought considerable movement in this direction, with a number of applications and new suite components dedicated to managing indirect sales and keeping partners happy. Additional progress late in the year added a more robust marketing component to channel management. Why? “Indirect selling partners are no longer captives to the direct vendor, as the market has gone from being product-centric to opportunity-centric,” says Charles Watson, vice president of marketing and products at BlueRoads, a San Mateo, Calif.–based provider of “partner opportunity management” solutions. “When customers enter into a buying process, they ask, ‘What are the alternatives to a PBX?’ They don’t think about who makes VoIP switches.” The vendor isn’t the center of the universe, Watson says, because the customer doesn’t necessarily care about a brand. “The partner is the brand, the problem-solver that puts the solution together. The indirect channel has many competing agendas, and vendors are starting to realize that the partner is key. Partners are changing from market-takers to market-makers.” —ML CUSTOMER INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENT CUSTOMERS All this talk about customer experience is nice, but data is still what makes a business go; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. One metric used to indicate positive customer experience is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), developed by Satmetrix and the consultancy Bain & Co. (See “The 2007 CRM Market Awards: Influential Leaders,” September 2007, page 24.) It’s not perfect for the task—it infers customer experience without granularizing it—but it’s a start. Meanwhile, business intelligence providers have to step up with new ways of understanding the admittedly fuzzy interaction between customers and companies. “Old analytics aren’t adequate anymore; customer satisfaction doesn’t work,” Greenberg says, noting that bad metrics are often worse than none at all. “One rating organization—a dumb-ass company I won’t name—decided to measure Web pages by ‘length of time viewed.’ If that’s the case, everybody should go to my blog, leave the computer on, and go on vacation.” In other words, measuring the right things is crucial. But so is getting those measurements into the hands of line-ofbusiness personnel. “Customer intelligence [and] analytics has emerged as a No immediate plans Research & investigation Pilot or prototype Some production applications Extensive use What is your current situation in regards to IMPLEMENTING the following? Web Services Services-Oriented Architecture Business Process Management Open Source Web 2.0 Related Technologies Enterprise Service Bus Event-Driven Architecture/ Event Processing Integration Competency Center 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% SOURCE: GARTNER very common buying factor,” says Joe Bergera, senior vice president and general manager of Sage Software Global CRM. “The primary focus is around marketing analytics; however, we see many customers with a general interest in analyzing data contained in their CRM systems. For example, who are my most profitable customers? What territories are performing best?” Today, ad hoc reporting and dashboards are standard requirements for any CRM system. Bergera notes that “a few, moreadvanced customers” are beginning to request support for predictive analysis. In 2008, he says, “it will become more critical for vendors to have a multitiered business intelligence strategy to address the full range of BI requirements—dashboards, ad hoc reporting, and predictive analysis.” The cost and availability of business intelligence analysts can be prohibitive, especially for smaller businesses, so the quality and quantity of prebuilt analysis (or content) “will become increasingly important to customers [who] are evaluating customer intelligence solutions,” Bergera says. As Bergera suggests, much of the analytic focus has been and will continue to be on marketing. This doesn’t quite 25 www.destinationCRM.com CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | DECEMBER 2007 http://www.destinationCRM.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - December 2007

CRM - December 2007 Contents Front Office Reality Check Customer Centricity SAP’s Midmarket Design A Shift in SAP’s Growth Strategy: Buy Big to Get Bigger The Buyer Is Your Owner Prime Time for Streaming TV The Word on the Floor Market Focus: Energy/Utilities: Speaking Truth to Power (Companies) The Pulse Required Reading It’s All Coming 2.0gether Power to the People Speak Up! Document Management That's a Breeze Customers Gain Traction With Off-Road Vehicles Getting Connected With Surveys Mobile Data Gets Better Reception Secret of My Success Re:Tooling The Tipping Point Pint of View

CRM - December 2007

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