Customer Relationship Management Software promotes the direct interaction between customers and the company through support of the people and processes involved in the entire customer lifecycle. CRM Software fosters a comprehensive, integrated approach to the customer, putting the customer at the center and integrating such corporate functions as Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and Field Sales and Service, all in an effort to increase Customer Satisfaction, improve internal morale, increase sales, and differentiate the company from its competitors.
Figure 1.
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Operational CRM
Operational CRM is at the heart of what we've previously just called CRM. It includes the components of CRM software that interact with the Back Office applications (such as ERP, SCM, and e-Procurement) in order to get product moving; it includes all of the business intelligence to automate or help facilitate the daily tasks of the Service, Marketing, and Sales teams, and to move information between them, and out to the Logistics and Financial folk; it also facilitates the flow of information to and from the forces in the Field, both Sales and Service. In a simple way, you can think of Operational CRM as Internal CRM, though that would give the image that it's a misnomer considering our global definition of CRM, above. It's not. The Operational aspects certainly promote timely and successful interactions with the customers, but behind the scenes.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM is a subset of the larger game of Corporate Business Intelligence, which itself grandly intends to reach across the boundaries of CRM to pull together all the data resources in the company, extract and transform the data in a sensible way, load it into one place, and be able to analyze corporate performance in a unified manner. Analytical CRM focuses specifically on the customer interaction and satisfaction piece of Corporate Business Intelligence.
Through measurement of customer reactions and interactions, it can help a company analyze and understand such things as: the success rate of marketing campaigns; sales rates and the performance of the sales team members; other sales related issues such as Customer profitability (considering both Sales and Service costs), Pipeline Revenue analysis, and product line success and trending. It can also help companies understand customer satisfaction rates and trends, and the performance of their service personnel; it can help cmpanies perform so-called web clickstream analysis to understand what their customers are looking at on their site; hence, what they like about or on the web site, and what doesn't work or attract so well; etc. And it can do this with new, real-time technology using data stores and user-interface dashboards, or OLAP (OnLine Analytic Processing), or the more mundane hard reports, and pushing it all to web information portals that are either customer-facing, or internal-facing, or both.
Remember, "you can't change what you don't measure." Analytical CRM, and Corporate Business Intelligence, are hard core and here to stay, and will only become more important as the fight to keep customers loyal and happy rages ever fiercer.
Collaborative CRM
Now, we get to the wizzy, obvious, up-front stuff that has given CRM the e-CRM makeover, and made everyone so excited about reducing costs and improving web-based service. This is the part about the new, cooperative efforts in CRM, like web conferencing, web forms handling, automated email handling, and unified message handling and intelligent message routing; web assistance tools such as Live Chat facilities, and Voice over IP (VoIP), and collaborative web browsing; and guided selling, and the soon-to-be omnipresent Call Me button.
Problem is, the more ways that you give people to interact with you, and the easier you make it, the more often those people will interact with you, and that may not save you Service overhead costs. You need to carefully understand the people-power ramifications behind e-CRM before making the leap. Just because customers may be happy with the new, often less-personal methods of interacting with their consumer companies, doesn't make this a wise decision for your company. Your support costs may actually rise. That may be OK, if your happy with the offsetting customer-satisfaction numbers. But be aware.
Figure 1.
Click here to view larger image
Operational CRM
Operational CRM is at the heart of what we've previously just called CRM. It includes the components of CRM software that interact with the Back Office applications (such as ERP, SCM, and e-Procurement) in order to get product moving; it includes all of the business intelligence to automate or help facilitate the daily tasks of the Service, Marketing, and Sales teams, and to move information between them, and out to the Logistics and Financial folk; it also facilitates the flow of information to and from the forces in the Field, both Sales and Service. In a simple way, you can think of Operational CRM as Internal CRM, though that would give the image that it's a misnomer considering our global definition of CRM, above. It's not. The Operational aspects certainly promote timely and successful interactions with the customers, but behind the scenes.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM is a subset of the larger game of Corporate Business Intelligence, which itself grandly intends to reach across the boundaries of CRM to pull together all the data resources in the company, extract and transform the data in a sensible way, load it into one place, and be able to analyze corporate performance in a unified manner. Analytical CRM focuses specifically on the customer interaction and satisfaction piece of Corporate Business Intelligence.
Through measurement of customer reactions and interactions, it can help a company analyze and understand such things as: the success rate of marketing campaigns; sales rates and the performance of the sales team members; other sales related issues such as Customer profitability (considering both Sales and Service costs), Pipeline Revenue analysis, and product line success and trending. It can also help companies understand customer satisfaction rates and trends, and the performance of their service personnel; it can help cmpanies perform so-called web clickstream analysis to understand what their customers are looking at on their site; hence, what they like about or on the web site, and what doesn't work or attract so well; etc. And it can do this with new, real-time technology using data stores and user-interface dashboards, or OLAP (OnLine Analytic Processing), or the more mundane hard reports, and pushing it all to web information portals that are either customer-facing, or internal-facing, or both.
Remember, "you can't change what you don't measure." Analytical CRM, and Corporate Business Intelligence, are hard core and here to stay, and will only become more important as the fight to keep customers loyal and happy rages ever fiercer.
Collaborative CRM
Now, we get to the wizzy, obvious, up-front stuff that has given CRM the e-CRM makeover, and made everyone so excited about reducing costs and improving web-based service. This is the part about the new, cooperative efforts in CRM, like web conferencing, web forms handling, automated email handling, and unified message handling and intelligent message routing; web assistance tools such as Live Chat facilities, and Voice over IP (VoIP), and collaborative web browsing; and guided selling, and the soon-to-be omnipresent Call Me button.
Problem is, the more ways that you give people to interact with you, and the easier you make it, the more often those people will interact with you, and that may not save you Service overhead costs. You need to carefully understand the people-power ramifications behind e-CRM before making the leap. Just because customers may be happy with the new, often less-personal methods of interacting with their consumer companies, doesn't make this a wise decision for your company. Your support costs may actually rise. That may be OK, if your happy with the offsetting customer-satisfaction numbers. But be aware.
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