Customer Relationship Management

The competitive edge businesses need and can’t afford to miss.		

Larry Caretsky, President
Commence Corporation	

Customer Relationship Management is one of the hottest and most talked about topics in the industry today and for good reason.   Industry analysts recently reported that CRM expenditures will grow from $2.8 billion in 1998 to $9 billion by 2002. 

So what actually is CRM, and what value will it provide to your business?

CRM is all about building long term business relationships with your customers. It is best described as the blending of internal business processes: sales, marketing and customer support with technology.  CRM solutions empower businesses to more efficiently and effectively manage the activities that affect their relationship with their customers. The ultimate goal of CRM is to meet and exceed customer expectations, create a positive customer experience and build customer loyalty.

For large enterprises, CRM has become a strategic initiative because of its potential for increased revenues and improved customer service.  Smaller businesses are forging ahead as well, and are using CRM solutions to capture and share customer information across multiple departments and job functions. Regardless of company size or industry, businesses have begun to recognize the value and importance of customer retention and are embracing new technology for automating customer service and support.  For the new millennium, it seems that the customer has finally become King!

Throughout the 90s businesses were focused on improving internal operations.  CEO’s tried to distinguish their company through operational excellence and product innovation.   Middle management focused on automating departmental functions such as sales and help desk support. They believed that automation and better management of their sales and customer service process would lead to increased revenue and customer satisfaction.  Vendors were all to happy to support this belief and raced to the scene with independent solutions for sales force automation, help desk and customer service functions.  While many of these applications provided increased productivity, the approach of using independent solutions to address departmental needs served only to created islands of information and database duplication.  Furthermore, the lack of system integration and workflow between these departments meant that vital customer information was unavailable to sales and support personnel without jumping from system to system. This did little to support cross selling opportunities or increase customer satisfaction.

CRM changes all of this and represents a continuing evolution in managing front office operations.  With CRM, traditional departmental applications for sales, marketing and customer service are consolidated into a single unified system capable of managing the entire customer life cycle. This approach allows employees throughout an organization to have immediate access to a complete profile of important customer information. Organizations who are implementing CRM solutions feel confident that providing access to this level of  information will assist their sales and support staff in better understanding the needs and buying patterns of their customers.

Because CRM has captured the mind share of company executives, industry analysts are beginning to look at what’s driving the CRM decision process. According to a recent study conducted by Cap Gemini and International Data Corporation the top four reasons for implementing CRM are:

•	gaining customer confidence and loyalty
•	providing personalized service to customers
•	acquiring better knowledge of customers and their buying habits
•	differentiating themselves from the competition

The Market

Large organizations are looking at CRM at an operational level where the need to integrate front office business processes with back end ERP, ERM and supply chain management systems is paramount to realizing the benefits associated with CRM.  These solutions are complex, often spanning a year or more in duration and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement.  In addition, they often require multi-location and multi-national considerations.

Small to medium sized businesses represent an entirely different profile.  Their needs are not as complex and are focused on consolidating front office sales, marketing and customer service information into a single cohesive system.  The immediate goal of these organizations is to put information in the hands of the people responsible for servicing their customers. They recognize that in today’s competitive environment providing quality customer service may be the one differentiating factor between them and their competition.  

These businesses however are unwilling to invest thousands of dollars per user for CRM systems or endure lengthy implementation schedules.  They prefer out of the box solutions that cost hundreds of dollars per seat and can be maintained by their in-house staff.

The Web

Many companies view the Web as a completely separate entity from their front office sales and customer service functions. They use the Web primarily as a marketing tool to increase visibility and generate new sales leads.  With CRM, the Web will become a critical component to managing and building long term business relationships with customers. In order to maximize the value of CRM solutions, integration of customer interactions must occur across all media - Web, telephone, e-mail, fax and face to face. Sales, marketing and support organizations are beginning to realize that it is no longer sufficient to only interact with their customers in traditional ways and are looking at the Web as a vehicle to expand their business relationships.

Solution Providers

There is a flurry of merger activity occurring in the market as vendors attempt to demonstrate that they have a complete CRM solution. Most of this activity is centered around traditional sales force automation vendors who are adding help desk and customer service solutions to their product offering. Buyers should be aware that it may take some time before these disparate systems are fully integrated and should carefully evaluate each alternative before moving ahead.  The chart below lists several of the main-stream companies competing for a piece of the CRM market.    

Commence 2000 

Commence 2000 is a true CRM solution built from the ground up.  For more than a decade Commence Corporation has supplied various manufacturers, resellers and end users with comprehensive tools and solutions to meet the needs of small to medium sized businesses.  Commence 2000 is designed with their needs in mind and consist of a suite of pre-built applications for Contact Management, Sales Force Automation, Help desk, Customer Service and Time and Billing functions.  Together these applications form the foundation for delivering high quality services to the customer before, during and after the sale.

Commence 2000 is intuitive, user friendly and ready to use right out of the box.  There are no lengthy implementation cycles and end users can customer tailor the applications to work the way they do without any programming knowledge.

What makes Commence 2000 unique is that it supports many of the features found in high end solutions costing thousands of dollars per seat.  With Commence 2000 all customer information is integrated into a single unified database accessible to all authorized employees without having to move from system to system.  Sharing this information between your sales department and customer care center is vital for creating an effective and consistent front office operation that improves employee efficiency, productivity and customer service. 

Commence 2000 will allow your business to support the sales process from lead qualification to closing the business, resolve customer issues responsively and professionally, manage marketing campaigns and facilitate team selling and support.

Furthermore, Commence 2000 users can expand the capabilities of the CRM applications with Allure, the company’s Web application server.  Allure provides the ability to publish and capture information to and from the Web and is seamlessly integrated to Commence 2000. This one stop shopping approach provides all that’s required to implement a complete Web enabled Customer Relationship Management system servicing customers, vendors, suppliers and business partners.  

The future success of your business may very well depend upon how effectively your company manages, processes and utilizes information to serve your customers.  With Commence 2000, you can be assured that you have the right solution for building customer loyalty and retention.

For more information about Commence products see www.commence.com