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CRM-Current and future trends!

Current trend in the CRM Vertical

Analytical CRM is fast growing component in the CRM vertical.  Relevant analytical capabilities are often interwoven into applications for sales, marketing, and service. Marketing applications generally come with predictive analytics to improve segmentation and targeting, and features for measuring the effectiveness of online, offline, and search marketing campaigns.

Marketing and finance personnel also use analytics to assess the value of multi-faceted programs as a whole.  Support-focused applications typically include dashboards similar to those for sales, plus capabilities to measure and analyze response times, service quality, agent performance, and the frequency of various issues.

Companies no longer regard marketing, service and sales as separate entities.   Thus the integrated approach to CRM.  Departments within enterprises — especially large enterprises — tend to function with collaborations.  For example, feedback from a technical support center can enlighten marketers about specific services and product features clients are asking for. Reps, in their turn, want to be able to pursue these opportunities without the burden of re-entering records and contact data into a separate SFA system.

Vertical CRM solutions are one of the newest trends in the CRM industry.  Need of different verticals of business are slightly different, so instead of a horizontal CRM and heavy customizations, vertical CRMs  try to accommodate these differences through customization, in order to fulfill the individual needs. For instance CRM software that specifically caters to the needs of the legal, financial, management and accounting sectors.

Now for some Future Trends of CRM vertical

Many CRM vendors offer Web-based tools (cloud computing) and software as a service (SaaS), which are accessed via a secure Internet connection and displayed in a Web browser. These applications are sold as subscriptions, with customers not needing to invest in purchasing and maintaining IT hardware, and subscription fees are a fraction of the cost of purchasing software outright.

: The era of the “social customer” refers to the use of social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) by customers.  This shift increases the power of customers to make purchase decisions that are informed by other parties sometimes outside of the control of the seller or seller’s network. In response, CRM will slowly have to shift focus and include social networks and user communities, podcasting, and personalization in addition to internally generated marketing, online advertising  etc..  We will talk more about social CRM in the next post.  Keep watching this space.  (don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS)

Another anticipated trend is  Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM, which is the customer-side counterpart of CRM.  Vendors are a ignored factor as far as CRM is concerned.  It is expected in future the VRM will be a part or a integrated part of CRM or VRM will evolve as a new vertical in the software industry.

): The name itself is exciting.   This trend in CRM will integrate  other relationships which affect, influence or  participate outside the circle of a normal CRM.    Other relations in this regard may include  primarily partners, employees and suppliers…as well as other secondary allies including government, press, and industry consortia.
We will bring more focus to the CRM practices in India and also talk about the Social CRM (I personally vouch that this is the next biggest trend in the CRM).

http://resources.ipott.com/softtrend/2011/04/crm-current-and-future-trends/

 

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Coffee Bean Technology. Social Marketing and Social Sales. Corporate Video Spanish 01-2011 version.
Video Rating: 0 / 5

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Mitch Lieberman presenting at Social CRM 2011

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PERFORMANCE DESK New FEATURES, Speed and Tweets

LIVERMORE, CA (7/10/2010) – Working online just got a whole lot cooler as Resilient Labs, Inc., takes the wrappers off the latest update of Performance Desk.  The popular customer database software cloud has been enhanced with Twitter integration, designer email templates, unique new sales force tools, plus a lead gathering form that can easily be added to any website or landing page to grow a customer’s email list.   It’s never been easier or more affordable for small business to step up to a full featured web-based solution that delivers on the promise of customer relationship management.

Since the Performance Desk product launch in January of 2010,  it’s unique “desktop application” look and feel has attracted the attention of sales professionals and shaken up the concept of what it’s like to work with a cloud based application.  Performance Desk’s approach to best practices in sales and email marketing are now enhanced with a host of new features that further streamline the sales process and email marketing experience. Performance Desk now provides users with a complete solution for gathering leads, building professional email campaigns to those leads, sales tools to turn those leads into real opportunities and most importantly innovative sales tools to turn leads into customers.  “For the first time, small business can take advantage of the types of tools the world’s biggest companies have been taking advantage of for years” says CTO and Founder John Rezendes. “In one-easy-to-learn interface, users will find powerful tools for gathering leads, supporting sales, tracking progress and even marketing over twitter”.

Performance Desk is designed to provide small business with the next generation of customer management tools for as low as .95 a month.  The product was designed from the ground up to be the perfect fit for those doing sales and marketing in start-ups, small business or even a one man shop.  “We are meeting the requests of so many sales people that have told us their frustrations in the way traditional sales force software focus more on reporting to executives, than enhancing the sales process.” Says company CEO Brent Silveria.  “We have created a workflow and feature-set that many sales people find to be the most productive they have seen.  Based on years of research into traditional CRM and sales account management software solutions, we have made sure that at every turn in the software, a sales person has the info they need at their fingertips, to build rapport, meet objections, probe for customer pain points and most importantly, close the deal”.

 

 

Performance Desks sales account management features have been enhanced to make them even more sales force focused, with new tools to track opportunities, prioritize opportunities quicker, and create a searchable knowledge base of notes taken during a call or visit.  New opportunity worksheets provide an organized format to take notes on the fly during a sales call and automatically translate them into a printable report.  Notes become part of a searchable knowledge base without the need to distract sales people with crating tags or keywords associated with the note.   This means that as sales people run into objections or need ideas to close a deal they can always reference how other similar situations were handled quickly and easily.

 

The Performance Desk dashboard has been upgraded to provide greater control over viewing opportunities closest to close and a fully interactive pipeline to get a real feel for which opportunities demand attention.  Opportunities can be sorted and viewed in different ways to inspire new thought about who to call and how to approach a contact.  The interactive pipeline is associated with these views to provide a clear roadmap of which opportunity is at which stage on its way to a win.  Drilling down into the dashboard now reveals deeper information about each opportunity.  Any activity associated with it can be seen without leaving the dashboard.

 

A new ready-to-use lead capture form can easily be embedded on any website to collect information and build the company’s email marketing list.    No advanced programming skills are required.  Simple copy and paste of the code into any html page will provide the subscriber with a professional lead capture system that moves information directly into the sales module.  “Subscribers can deploy their lead form the first day of their 15 day free trial and start collecting leads from their landing page or website” says Mr. Rezendes. “Brent and I understand what it takes to run a small business and have taken those needs seriously in every aspect of Performance Desk”.

 

Skype integration provides clickable phone numbers to leverage Skype as an affordable phone service to call landlines anywhere in the world at amazing rates.  Skype integration into Performance Desk provides the same type of computer based dialing found on enterprise and custom sales database systems at a fraction of the cost, making it a realistic solution for small business and sole proprietors.   Dialing contacts direct from the program saves on dialing time as you work through your leads directly from the interface.

 

Twitter integration brings social CRM features to Performance Desk with the new Tweet Command Center.  Using the Tweet Command Center, users can engage customers and potential customers about company news, address support issues or clarify misconceptions right from within Performance Desk.   Use Twitter as a new communications channel for the company to create leads, service tickets and more.

The Tweet Command Center provides subscribers with a duel column view of tweets sent by the company and the tweets of those that the company follows.  Tweets can be sent from within Performance Desk with automatic shrinking to better fit character limits. Users can search Twitter for specific keywords, track related tweets, and the saved search functionality provides the subscriber with automatically updated searches of subjects like company name and product name to know exactly what customers are saying about the subscriber on the social network.  Performance Desk subscribers can respond to tweets found in search directly from the tweet command center either as direct messages or as public responses.

 

Performance Desk’s email marketing module has been upgraded with an ever increasing library of professionally designed templates to create email with impact.  Template editing has been designed to quickly change text and graphics without waiting for screen redraws and slow server calls.   Templates are available for email newsletters, email retail promotions, sales form letters and more.  Templates in Performance Desk are available for email campaigns.  Templates are also available when emailing individual contacts.  This feature allows users to build a custom library of form letter responses to speed up sales.  Any email template can be edited to turn it into a more individual response, and of course, mail merge features can personalize any database field into emails created from a template.

 

New reports give users an overview of all their campaigns at a glance. Now it’s quick to see who has opened an email and who has clicked through to an offer and follow up with them directly by phone or a second email.  The overview provides a way for users to compare analytics from one campaign to another or the difference between test mailings.  Individual campaign reports provide real-time feedback of each campaign as it deploys.  Campaign tracking reports provide a past and future view of campaigns on a timeline.  New list sampling features give experienced email marketers the ability to divide their contacts into multiple groups to compare results between test offers.

 

Performance Desk now works across all popular browsers on Windows and Macintosh.  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all deliver great results without any additional downloads or installing any client software.

 

Resilient Labs Inc. produces cloud based software for small to mid-size business.  The company’s flagship product is Performance Desk, a customer database application specifically designed to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, small business and start ups with tools to address sales, email marketing, social CRM, and helpdesk support.   Resilient Labs, Inc. specializes in web 2.0 applications that push the cutting edge of web based technology and online user interaction. Founded in 2009, Resilient Labs Inc. is a privately held California Corporation.  Resilient Labs, Inc. is headquartered in Livermore, CA.   For more information please visit http://www.performancedesk.com. or call 925-337-7735.

 

Find More Social Crm Articles

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Oracle customers comment on how Oracle Social CRM impacts their businesses.

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NextPrinciples is a cloud-based social CRM company with an initial social media monitoring (SMM) module for events and campaigns that is simple to use and provides an easy on-ramp to full integration with enterprise CRM systems. Please vote for us on Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad at launchpad.e2conf.com

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Simple And Effective – Crm For Non Profits

The Non-profit establishment is though different from a profit making business, but the basic needs of a business with the various challenges remain the same. Non-profits and NGOs can make their processes much refined and effective by making use of relevant business applications/ tools which helps them increase their productivity.

NGOs have multiple set of challenges in terms of:

Raising funds
Attracting people
Following up with donors â?? giving them access to monthly reports
Executing online campaigns
Keeping track of their processes, delivering the best within the constrained resources

An easy to use and effective tool will help Non Profits maintain multiple processes and keep track of their expenditure etc. while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness. A simple activity of keeping track of all donors and sending Email notifications of their investments, etc while generating receipts etc. can be easily automated, which is done in a cumbersome way by using excel sheets etc by these NGOs as of now!

Well, YES! the emerging Social CRM tools, ensure that the NGOs and Non Profits can keep in touch, very personally with their existing supporters online, from simply remembering to always wish a happy birthday to a donor to sending regular updates, social networking capabilities merged with a CRM becomes a powerful tool, giving many capabilities to the organisation.

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A Dentists Experience: FaceBook CRM Business Apps

Dentists revenues, like those of other professionals, have been affected by the recession. Dentists are going all out there to market their services to attract more patients. They are trying various forms of media like print, television, radio and the internet. Kamyoo FaceBook CRM Apps is another effective alternative.

Given consumers changing behavior, dentists have been allocating more resources towards online marketing and website building. To set up the website, an investment of 00 to 00 is required. Each month, an additional – for website maintenance and another – 0 for Search Engine Optimization are incurred.

Most dentists have been complaining that their website did not generate returns on investment as only a small portion of leads generated have been converting to paying customers, often taking a long time. Looking at ads online is similar to viewing ads in yellow pages or listening to ads on the radio.

Patients want to validate dental ads that they come across online from trusted sources such as friends and relatives. The immediate place they go to today are social networks where their friends and family have a presence. If a business does not exist on Facebook, it is easy for customers to move to competitors for services.

Statistically speaking, only 14 % of the population trusts advertisements while 78 % of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family (2). Considering this and the fact that majority of the customers still rely on word of mouth marketing for their dental needs, dentists should use powerful social media platforms to market their services.

Dentists should explore having a Facebook business page about their dental practice and additional Customer Relationship Management applications embedded on it. Kamyoo, an off-the-shelf product can be used instead of building the applications from scratch. This can save the dentists time and does not shift their focus from their practice.

The basic package consists of:

Welcome Page: This is the Facebook business page wherein customers, friends, employees and vendors can be invited to the dentists business network. The page which is similar to website home page is easy to edit the content from the dashboard.
Customer Testimonial Component: Dentists can invite their customers to write recommendations of their service and selectively publish customer testimonials on their business page. Prospects will have the option to view their friends reviews only.
Promotions Component: Dentists can easily create promotions and referrals to their social network and publish to Facebook business page.
Search Engine Optimization: Kamyoo pages and business content on Facebook will enable search engine optimization and enable local searches to find business easily.

Kamyoo can set up the business page and other apps on Facebook in less than 24 hours. There is no setup cost, only a modest subscription charge of less than 0 a month.

Kamyoo Facebook CRM Apps can market your services efficiently, through word of mouth, harnessing the viral power of social networks and slash your online marketing costs by 90%. You can feel the pulse of your customers opinion on your services and can control what is being said by them about your dental practice online.

For more information on Social CRM Solutions or marketing your business on Facebook, please click http://www.kamyoo.com.

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Mashing Up Social Networks for Improved Sales Productivity

The growth of social networking sites has occurred at an amazing rate, primarily because of the value they provide as a mechanism for organizing and managing our complex web of relationships. Increasingly, corporations are looking for ways to create business value from the use of social networks as well.

Using technology with mashups to weave social networks into the fabric of the traditional IT infrastructure. Wavemaker Software and Kapov Technology,use a  mashup pattern that combines Kapow’s mashup-enabling feeds and services, with the abilities of Wavemaker Software to compose those feeds and services into something new that creates unique business value. This could easily be extended to include Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Friendster, Plaxo, etc.

There are more than 165 million websites on the public web today, growing at an annual rate of 35% – and a very large number of corporate websites on the private web. This collection of web based content represents an enormous repository of information with significant potential business value for companies who are able to access it.

Forward-thinking companies today are finding ways to tap into this vast web repository of information and apply it to everyday business uses that help them get more out of their existing application infrastructure to create a competitive edge. They are becoming smarter, sooner.

Examples of Web Intelligence are; * Competitive and Market Data, Pricing Intelligence, Government Agency Information, Public Domain Records and Internal Operational Data

What You See Is What You Get

Most data is accessible from a database, but has greater value when you see it in on a web page “in the wild”, because you can understand the context of that data, and more importantly, see how it relates to other pieces of data, that collectively, add more value. Kapow harvests web intelligence by interacting with the web interface to collect web content and convert it into a structured form that can be written to a database or used by an application.

The Sky Is the Limit

This concept of web harvesting can be applied equally well to web applications behind the firewall. Kapow makes it very easy to create composite data models that bring together data from public and private web sources and combine it with data from internal SQL databases.

The possibilities are endless. Having the ability to access and utilize any web-based data source, in an automated way, either on-demand or in batch mode, on a massive scale, changes the playing field.

Kapow Technologies, Inc., the expert in harvesting mashable public and private web intelligence with software that turns the Web into the world’s largest database, is partnering with Wavemaker, a provider of open source tools for rapid Web application development, on an innovative “Social CRM” mashup application.

Called “Sales Social,” the mashup enables sales professionals and other service providers to more easily locate information about prospects and customers through the integration of several popular CRM and social media sites including Salesforce, LinkedIn and Technorati.

“Today’s CRM application users are tapping half a dozen other Web resources to populate their databases and get their jobs done,” said Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies. “Sales Social drastically reduces one’s need to leave a CRM application to gather the required information. Thanks to rapidly deployed AJAX applications and mashup robots, companies can create powerful Social CRM applications in a day or two.”

“Together, WaveMaker and Kapow are making the benefits of Web 2.0 in the enterprise very clear,” said Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker. “Kapow simplifies Web data delivery and WaveMaker simplifies Web application development, enabling the rapid creation of sales and marketing tools that deliver competitive advantage.”

www.kapowtech.com

www.wavemaker.com

 

 

The customer relationship management software company Salesforce.com, known for its cloud computing strategies, made what some would consider a heavenly acquisition recently with its 0 million purchase of Radian6, a social media monitoring and engagement company. What does Salesforce’s move say about social media, marketing and the rise of social CRM? Paul Slack, Splash Media co-founder and chief learning officer, discusses the implications with SplashCast host Renay San Miguel.

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CRM Turning Into Cmr – the Future of CRM

 

For the past 10 years almost all enterprises follow the CRM philosophy that says: 

The process of turning a CRM strategy into business results included initiatives such as aligning your business processes and functions around customer needs, recruiting people that are customer friendly, training staff how to deal with your customer, listening to your customer’s likes and dislikes and changing your business practices and product mix accordingly, using CRM software to organize and present important customer information to sales and services employees.

Typically CRM was characterized by a closed loop consisting of analytical and strategic CRM, operational CRM as well as collaboratice CRM.  

For the past few months it is noticeable that markets and customers change significantly. Especially financial markets are under pressure. Web 2.0 is only one reason for markets getting more and more transparent. Customers are well informed and do cherry picking for optimal satisfaction of their needs. Customers’ trust is decreasing significantly and customer retention is reaching an all time low.  

In the banking industry you can watch how customers choose multiple banks in order to handle their banking needs. Consequences are a highly increased complexity to manage financial needs followed by an overload in handling various relations to banks.

What do we learn out of today’s challenges and how do we conquer them? Companies need to reconsider and expand their CRM strategy. Methods need to be developed which indicate customers’ needs more exactly. Ideas of conventional CRM need to be combined with new CMR approaches. There is no doubt that the era of conventional CRM is outdated. Customers are in the driver’s seat now and manage all relevant relationships according to their needs and preferences.

In times of customer managed relations we need to learn how to simplify our customers’ lifes in order to reduce complexity. Interactions between customers and companies need to be enriched with pleasant service experiences. Excellent service combined with the right amount of emotions will span the bridge between customer needs and offered products and services. Companies need to learn to listen and manage all open and hidden impulses sent by the customers.   

Today’s challenges call for a fusion of the known CRM philosophy with the CMR proposition

First and foremost the CRM closed loop needs to be complemented by a new dimension – the customer!

Changes in philosophy and strategy are followed by modifications in infrastructure and applications. Terms like conversational CRM, social CRM, next best offer and realtime decisioning promise solutions for highly individualized and innovative sales approaches.

“Advanced real-time predictive analytics allow each interaction at any time
and any channel to be tailored for each customer” Source: Gareth Herschel, Gartner, ‘03

There are four elements which are distinguishing a CRM environment from a CMR infrastructure:

 

•       

ü      Discovery of customers as new sales channel (conversational CRM)

ü      Usage of internal and external networks (social CRM)

•       

ü      Real Time Decisioning

ü      Usage of web tracking results and customer profiles to offer most suitable products

ü      Impulse generated campaigns (clustering of homogenous impulses)

ü      Individualized real time marketing (Portal)

ü      Next Best Offer

•       

ü      Churn analysis

ü      Web tracking reports

 

I strongly believe that CRM combined with CMR elements will be essential for the sustainable survival of all businesses in the future.

Unfortunately powerpoint slides could not be placed within this article. If interested please contact me at info@thomashamele.com

CMR article that focuses on the details of CMR elements such as conversational CRM, social CRM, next best offer, realtime decisioning.

 

Questions, discussions and different opinions are very much appreciated. Please contact me at info@thomashamele.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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