We often comment that software
rarely pours out of the box like breakfast cereal, and usually “some
assembly is required”. This has especially been true with the history
of CRM systems, designed to automate your business processes.
In
fact, the enterprise should plan on in-house customization of
software-to-process. Strategy therefore calls for software acquisition
and deployment that allows for all the flexibility you can foresee.
“If you’re using CRM you already know that your sales staff isn’t in love with entering data into a CRM system. Making the sales process a tool rather than a simple data collector fixes that problem.
“Automatically generate a quote, provide pricing,
offer possible rebuttals to closing objections. There are a number of
tools that could help close a deal. Include these within the CRM sales process and you should have good buy in.” – Best Practices in Sales Process Automation
As we’ve often said, CRM
success comes from the ability of the agent to work efficiently and
productively. Customization requires integration with existing systems,
which is the greatest demand made of CRM software, in our view. This is especially true in the area of Customer Service and Support.
It is often argued that CRM has been:
“sold to executives running call centres or sales
organizations as a way to wring out inefficiency, force standardized
processes and gain better insight into the state of the business … a
way to track customers, route and facilitate inbound communications and
report on the progress of various marketing, sales or support
activities.
“But what these solutions generally did not address
was the need to help organizations resolve customer problems, answer
their questions faster or help customers solve their own problems. For
this reason, we have seen a slow but steady shift in focus and
investment from automating core internal front-office functions to
streamlining edge processes like online customer support, product
returns or account management.” – The Truth About On-Demand CRM
We’ve shown examples in the past of ways in
which Dovetail Software enhancements of Amdocs Clarify™ systems have
exposed the business processes to easy manipulation. This is done with
using simple IT tweaks with patches and command calls.
A
good example of the compelling need for synchronization and integration
lies in the enterprise’s local and global supply/value chain. One
Dovetail customer who needed to manage a global inventory and repair
operation reports that they were able to case-synchronize in real time
with relative ease. This was achieved with little custom effort.
They used Dovetail’s CRM suite of clients with Dovetail Web Services to keep service request information in synch across multiple CRM
systems deployed across several companies. This allowed, for example,
vendor inventory to be checked for part availability. Cases could be
handed off to service partners for resolution, and accessed for status
or update. This provided them with a comprehensive view of all service
and support activity.
We’ve seen similarly easy solutions arise with customers who need to integrate their Clarify CRM
data handling with non-Clarify Logistics applications, like providing
Field Engineering support. Once again Dovetail Web Services made it
easy to achieve rapid and reliable integration with other applications.
