At Dovetail Software, we study all the events within the world of CRM. Our specialized field of enhancing Amdocs Clarify™ databases with our own Dovetail CRM
applications is interwoven with developments throughout the wider
industry. We note similarities in process between us and the rest of
the world: sometimes we take inspiration from the new ideas emerging;
sometimes we could swear they’re just copying us.
A glance at the CRM industry today reveals the trials and tribulations of integration. New CRM
products have to be adopted by the users, or the company has wasted its
money. The best way to secure good adoption is to present users with
something they already know how to use.
We should know
better, but because our own products are so eagerly devoured by agents
in departments receiving the Dovetail upgrade, we are continually
astonished at how hard this seems to pull off in the rest of the market.
“InvisibleCRM, a technology provider of applications designed to increase user adoption and ROI of enterprise systems, specifically addresses the biggest challenge with CRM
systems: Getting users to actually use it, instead of staying with
their desktop systems. By ‘invisibly’ synchronizing the desktop
applications with the web-based product, InvisibleCRM’s products
effectively remove that hurdle. The result, according to the report, is
a sharp increase in CRM system user adoption.
”’InvisibleCRM enables enterprises who are struggling with low CRM
adoption rates to create an environment that is familiar to their
users, and therefore more user-friendly,’ said Cheryl Gutowski,
research analyst, Nucleus Research. ‘With InvisibleCRM, users are
likely to increase their productivity, increase the amount of contact
and lead information that is tracked in the CRM system, and drive greater profitability for their organizations.’ product release
Systems integration appears necessary to get
users to adopt the interfaces presented by the on-demand providers in
the surging markets of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). User adoption
therefore becomes a factor in company thinking about the ROI of SaaS. On-premise has long had the same issue.
“CRMs are complex and powerful programs that take a
lot of time and effort to maintain. If you need to coordinate a large
business development effort with many prospects, you will get a huge
payoff.
“But many of the lawyers I coach have trouble finding
enough time to take their top clients to lunch. If time is an issue, I
say use a spreadsheet or word processor table. It won’t be as slick or
as powerful as a CRM, but you will have a
whole lot more time to do what you should be doing: building personal
relationships with the people who matter most to your practice.” Would a CRM help you keep in touch?
There is a learning curve with all new
software, as there is with any new procedure or protocol, and typically
retraining is factored into the upgrade’s project estimation. The
lesson to be learned by the software industry – especially since we
know that users won’t read the manual
– is that adoption skyrockets if people like the benefits so
immediately that they become eager to explore the rest of the package.
We
won’t belabor what we’ve described fully elsewhere, but Clarify users
on their first day with Dovetail applications find them identical to
their old applications, except with treasuries of new features and
functions. Users immediately grasp what they can do with the new
functionality, and co-workers run around sharing what they’ve
discovered with each other. It’s like unwrapping a present, and we’ve
documented this aspect of user excitement with Dovetail upgrades to Amdocs Clarify systems repeatedly.
User
excitement and motivation is the best driver of innovation. This is
especially true of knowledge management within the enterprise, where
logging data to a repository or processing system is generally an extra
chore added to every worker’s taskload.
“Here is a nice summary brief by IDC,
‘Getting Results by Empowering the Information Worker: What Web 2.0
Offers Beyond Blogs and Wikis.’ It talks about moving more of web 2.0
than just blogs and wikis into the enterprise. I really liked their
contrast of the web and the intranet. ‘Consumers are discovering a
whole new world of collaboration, seamless integration, and the ability
to share structured and unstructured data with an endless assortment of
strangers. Enterprise information workers, on the other hand, are mired
in a disjointed, disconnected world of manifold applications, each with
its own login and password, access control policies, and confusing and
non-standard interface.’
“It resonates with the question I learned from
reading Andrew McAfee. How many people find it easier to find stuff
inside their organization on the intranet than on the web? No one ever
raises their hand. The report goes on to say that those raised on the
web will not tolerate the old ways and change will occur regardless of
what the formal enterprise says. These new users will take control over
their own information environment just as they do on the Web.” More on Enterprise 2.0 from IDC
We admire this key point: “those raised on
the web will not tolerate the old ways and change will occur regardless
of what the formal enterprise says.” We believe this, or to put it more
accurately, we see that this is true. In fact, all of us know this. The
CRM industry is changing in large part
because of new and better habits of working, buying, and communicating
that we have all experienced through being on the largest network the
world has ever known.
These new habits are shaping many industries, including software, CRM, customer service and support, and marketing. We try to build democratic software
that liberates users and in-house IT departments to do their jobs in
the best ways they can, innovating to suit their business processes,
because they now can.
