“For many
institutions, the stringent requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley have forced
them to change the way they handle multi-channel customer contacts. Our
clients, such as ADP, e*Trade and Union Bank of California, have found Dovetail CRM and EmailManager have helped them meet ever tougher regulatory requirements while improving their customer service.” – Turn Transactions into Interactions
Beyond the changes wrought by regulatory change, customer relationship management – CRM -
is evolving as companies struggle to move into a posture of acting
rather than reacting to their market’s paradigm changes of recent years.
“Now companies are still thinking tactically, but with an eye to the long-term strategic goals.” – CRM’s next step
The turn in nature of the customer from
recipient to contributor, empowered by Web 2.0, is probably the largest
force acting on the front office. But there’s more. IT has its hands
full bringing legacy systems not only up to date with new software
paradigms, but into a condition of proactive agility.
“Recent research from analyst firm IDC shows that companies are beginning to move into a new phase of CRM evolution—what is being called the “decision” phase. Users are looking at CRM as more than just a tool, but as a source of information that will help them make good business decisions.
“These forward-thinking businesses are utilizing their CRM systems in a strategic manner to change processes in order to attract, service and retain customers. Providers of CRM
solutions are being tasked with the challenge of meeting these needs
with advanced analytics, flexibility and accessibility of information
to allow users to retrieve and utilize the proper customer information
instantly, providing customers with a seamless service experience.” – CRM Execs: Where Is the Industry Headed?
At the helm of the enterprise nowadays there
are many, many decisions to be made, some of them often more pressing
in their urgency than business, for all its air of derring-do, is
really comfortable with.
Business intelligence (BI) has
been a grail of sorts for over a decade, in its early days promising to
supply executives and managers with market intelligence and performance
management based on key performance indicators (KPI) leveled against
the body of knowledge.
BI is still trying to measure up to
these inflated expectations – but maybe now we’re getting somewhere.
Best practices for BI are beginning to clarify.
“One important consideration in the data infrastructure is the source and latency of the CPM data, often presented in an executive dashboard interface. Some CPM
dashboards have KPIs based on “post-operational” or analytical data,
often stored in a data warehouse, McKnight explained. This is fine, but
organizations should be aware of the implications for CPM
dashboards, he said, since many data warehouses are batch loaded and
may not refresh during the day. This means that KPIs based on this data
won’t change during the day, either.” – Four corporate performance management best practices, from end-users and experts
Even as IT internally manages the feats of
integration usually required to deliver actionable BI, and the vendors
develop bridging systems, at the same time a radical force is
undercutting the established order.
“The consumerization of BI: Today the cutting edge
technologies reside with consumers. From there, this technology filters
into the enterprise. This fundamental shift means application vendors
will have to give users what they want: Sophisticated applications in
an easy-to-understand wrapper, says Campbell. ‘The technology at home
is creeping into the enterprise,” he says.’” – Business intelligence: The next frontier
This core craving of the enterprise, to be
aware of how it’s doing in real-time – a reasonable desire for any
organization – now embraces a larger world of KPIs than simply the
desks of Finance. Ironically, the information required to come together
for the most part already exists, dispersed atomically throughout the
entire organization, in myriad separate Excel spreadsheets. This
creates a tantalizing frustration.
But just as Dovetail CRM, and EmailManager,
have extended the knowledge management capabilities of companies in the
regulatory arena, so Dovetail’s embrace of Microsoft’s .NET 2.0 platform will enable integration in diverse ways in this arena of spreadsheet intelligence. More later.
