CRM News Feed

While developing a CRM system in-house is not realistic for most community banks, there are a wide variety of options available in the marketplace, ranging from the simple to the intricate. Forming a strong partnership with the right outside vendor is essential to success with CRM, bankers and experts say.

Roy Balkus, vice president of technology for Naugatuck Savings Bank, has a "huge mountain" of data on the bank’s customers. "What we’re doing right now is data warehousing, which gives us a lot more in terms of details as to what customers do," he said.
But eventually Balkus, who chairs America’s Community Bankers’ Retail Banking, Operations, Security & Technology Committee, would like to take that data to compare customers, determine their profitability, and cross-sell appropriate products to them.

The $624 million-asset bank currently does not have the technology or software to do that. Customer relationship management software "would create the ability for me to know" what products to push to which customers, he said.

CRM, at its best, organizes the different areas within a bank, including information from branches, to create a unified memory of a customer and instructions on how to treat that customer. Many banks are finding that CRM software is becoming a must-have marketing tool.

Community banks are pretty good at knowing what their customers need, but their customer service and marketing efforts are often unstructured, said Kathleen Khirallah, TowerGroup’s research director of retail banking. "What a CRM system allows them to do is get it organized," she said.

While developing a CRM system in-house is not realistic for most community banks, there are a wide variety of options available in the marketplace, ranging from the simple to the intricate. Forming a strong partnership with the right outside vendor is essential to success with CRM, bankers and experts say. But navigating the seas of CRM software options can be daunting. Here are six steps banks can take to help guide their CRM software purchasing decisions.

Step 1: Assess Your Needs and Expectations

The first thing banks should do when considering CRM software is to determine the banks overall CRM strategy. Be clear about the goals of the organization, Khirallah said.

The term "CRM" can be vague and far-reaching. It can refer to methodologies, software, or Internet capabilities that help manage customer relationships in an organized way. The term is frequently used to encompass every interaction a bank has with its customers, especially all processes and procedures with the goal of customer service or sales.

The bottom line in all CRM systems is improved profitability, but banks can choose to reach that end through many different means. That could include cross-selling  products, working with existing household information, managing entire relationships, growing lending, or growing deposits. "Most people want to do all of the above," said Steve Kayser, senior vice president of marketing for COCC, a community bank outsourcing , development, and consulting company.

Paul Driscoll, executive vice president of $2.3 billion-asset Beneficial Mutual Savings Bank in Philadelphia, said that when his bank begins to look into CRM software, the planning group will be a combination of people at the bank, including representatives from technology, marketing, and banking. "It will be a mesh of all that … an enterprise-wide project," he said.

At this stage, banks should also decide who should be responsible for purchasing and implementing the CRM software. Khirallah suggested that two people at the bank, the head of business and the head of I.T., handle the project. "TowerGroup refers to this team as ‘Gemini pairs,’" she said. "This project cannot be delegated solely to the I.T. group."

Step 2: Decide Which Options Are Critical

At this point, banks should decide what they absolutely must have in terms of CRM software. They should also develop a list of important, but not critical, needs, and a list of things that would be nice to have in a system, like add-ons.

There are many levels of CRM software on the market. Weissman breaks the software down into five levels, ranging from basic to advanced.

The simplest systems just keep track of basic contact information. "It’s basically an elaborate, nice, telephone book," Weissman said.

The second level has the ability to track contacts. These systems take the concept of a universal telephone book and add the ability to track telephone calls, meetings, and e-mails. This and the universal telephone book are stand alone, meaning they don’t integrate with other databases in the bank.

The next level brings in account data. On these systems, when a bank employee looks up a customer, he or she can not only see the customers contact info, but also can look at which accounts the customer has with the bank.

Bringing in profitability data is the next step. At this level, the CRM system moves from one that houses information to one that creates information. These systems offer "an income statement for each account that each customer has" to show the bank "how much money they are making or losing for each account," Weissman said.

The highest level is a fully integrated CRM system. That’s where the CRM system is incorporated into the sales and marketing database  system and allows for analysis of each customer relationship for each account. Systems at this level look at customers to determine what new products to offer them. Systems at this level also have the ability to bring in external data, such as information on demographics and business graphics.

"We are firm believers that, at a minimum, you should have a level four" system, Weissman said.

Most experts and software providers agree that the best form of CRM software is enterprise wide. Enterprise-wide CRM systems interface with all of the bank’s other systems, so that the information flows through the entire organization. "If you’re going to do (CRM) right, you need the whole institution to play a role," Kayser said.

Step 3: Match Your Needs With Software

After determining the bank’s needs, the next step is to conduct due diligence to match those needs with appropriate vendors and services. Some vendors can match their technology with the software needs of many institutions. Other providers specialize in a certain area, which may or may not match the area of a bank’s focus. Either way, banks should require all vendors being considered to demonstrate how their software can meet the bank’s expectations.

"Work with a number of vendors to match your goals," Kayser said.

Banks should "cast a wide net" in this stage of the process, Khirallah said. She suggested evaluating about 10 different vendors at this point. Consulting groups can assist banks with vendor selection. Industry associations, such as America’s Community Bankers, also offer resources that can help. ACBs Buyers Guide, which is available online, provides contact information on 14 providers that offer CRM services  to community banks.

Step 4: Narrow Down Choices And Issue RFPs

At this point, banks should narrow down their vendor choices to about three or four. They should look for CRM software vendors with proven track records of success, Kayser said. They also should look for state-of-the-art technology.

"It’s important that they deal solely with financial institutions and have a very good knowledge of what financial institutions need and of the competitive landscape," Weissman said. "They should understand things besides CRM at banks," like teller systems, help desks, and the call center side, he said.

Banks should look for vendors that focus on financial institutions of their size, Khirallah said. She also recommended that banks visit the clients of the vendors they are considering, even flying to an out-of-town bank for a day visit. Once there, Khirallah said, ask the clients a series of questions about their CRM system, including:

<ul>
<li>Was the CRM software easy to install? </li>
<li>What did the training entail? </li>
<li>Is the system working as you expected? </li>
<li>How is the vendor to work with? </li>
<li>Was the vendors pricing accurate, or were there hidden costs? </li>
</ul>

Are you happy with the system?
When issuing request for proposals, banks should be specific about what they are looking for, and make sure all questions and requests are addressed.

Step 5: Evaluate the Vendor Proposals

"The biggest mistake is buying CRM based on how pretty the screen is," Weissman said. "The screen should look pretty good, but what’s behind the screen?" he asked. Questions toask include:

Does the system have profitability assessment and analysis?

Is it based on relationship creation, not customer or house holding?

Does it have a data warehouse for historical data?

Does it include retail and commercial?

Is it providing external data?

Is it integrating all that into a consolidated view of the customer relationship?

Is it a fully integrated system?
A strong partnership between the bank and the vendor is key, Kayser said.

Costs are big with CRM software, but the return on investment can be even bigger. There is a broad range of costs for CRM software. Cost is variable, based on the number of users and the size of a bank’s database, Khirallah said.

"These are not inexpensive systems," Kayser said. Costs depend on how much software the bank wants to deploy, what pieces they select, and how much help on the implementation side is needed, he said. Costs can range from $50,000 to $250,000, and can reach up to $5 million for large banks, he said.

"It’s a real wide range," Weissman said, adding that there are systems that are affordable. "We work with banks that are very small and very large. Our CRM is affordable to the small guys," he said.

In Grant Thorntons 2005 survey of community bank executives, 64 percent said updating or expanding technology to better track customer needs was important to their bank’s success, yet only 33 percent were confident about their performance in that area.

Step 6: Implement the CRM System

Utilizing, not just having, a CRM system is critical, Weissman said.

"One reason projected CRM returns are not being fully realized is because over 75 percent of companies are not fully using CRM once it is implemented," according to Doing CRM Right: What It Takes to Be Successful With CRM. a 2004 study by IBM. 

CRM is done right less than 15 percent of the time across the globe, according to the survey, which polled more than 370 companies across all industries.

"Differentiating steps are not the big-ticket items, such as technology implementation or customer data integration , rather, they are the human-oriented steps such as change management and process change," said the IBM survey.

"Work with someone who is going to do all the set up for you," Weissman said. A key part of CRM training is working with the bank over the long haul to leverage the potential of the system, he said.

Access is extremely important, Weissman said. "Frequently I see banks make this purchase and give only a handful of employees access. That makes no sense," he said. "You have to get this out to all the people that have direct customer contact… or what’s the point of having it?"

Full-blown implementation is a fairly long, detailed system, Kayser said.

Choosing and implementing CRM software is not the last step in customer service. Community banks still need to keep constant communication open between their employees and their customers, Kayser said. Implementation training should include a mix of vendor and business unit training, Kayser added.

"This is about process. This is about workflow. This is about overall knowledge level. You need great people training, along with great skills and a great system." Kayser said.

Even With Technology, It’s Still About People

Community banks should emphasize training and incentives over technology when it comes to implementing a customer relationship management solution, said a May report from Celent Communications, a Boston-based research and consulting firm serving the financial industry.

Also, "success isn’t defined by deploying the software, but by customer-oriented goals," said the report, Branch Automation: The Convergence of Teller, Platform and CRM, which focused on banks with less than $1 billion in assets. "Setting a strategy, training your front-line staff, providing proper incentives, and being able to measure and reward based on those incentives drives a successful CRM implementation."

While technology shouldn’t dominate the discussion, it can play a role in cutting costs, the report said. Smart client technology, for example, can improve the response time of teller workstations, allowing banks to eliminate costlier branch servers, the report said. Instead of relying on individual servers for each branch, a bank can install "smart clients" that interface directly with a centralized server.

In addition to boosting the speed at which a teller can access customer information, a smart client gives tellers offline functionality, which is not available with branch servers. If a branch server repair, "someone from I.T. must go to the branch to repair the server. This can be both costly and time consuming and can lead to extended periods of downtime  at the branch," the report said.

As existing branch automation systems grow obsolete, more banks will begin to upgrade their technology with options such as smart clients, Celent said. However, "the market is warming up, but is by no means hot," the report said. As upgrades do progress, according to Celent, community banks will tend to purchase complete branch automation solutions from their core vendors. "These customers don’t have the ability or budgets to undertake integration or customization projects and will prefer a single source," the report said.

Download this IDC Executive Brief to read about marketing resource management (MRM) software, an emerging form of customer relationship management (CRM) technology that can help businesses streamline their marketing efforts without increasing staff. Find out why the time is now to invest in analytic applications that can help companies better capitalize on customer-facing activities, ramp up marketing campaigns without increasing marketing spending, and track the results of those campaigns.

This article from SAP describes the challenges that the circulation departments of daily newspapers face in trying to rebuild shrinking subscriber bases. Learn about the impact that the FTC’s Do Not Call Registry is having on newspapers’ ability to identify and capture subscribers, and find out how an integrated customer relationship management solution that’s specifically tailored to the media industry can help your newspaper reverse the trend of declining readership by systematically and cost-effectively identifying, acquiring, and retaining new and lapsed subscribers.

With newspaper readership steadily declining over the last decade, publishers are understandably seeking new and inventive ways to boost subscriptions. This informative article from SAP describes the negative impact that online and broadcast media outlets are having on newspaper circulation departments around the world, and explains how SAP’s campaign automation application, SAP for Media, can help newspapers re-grow their shrinking subscriber bases.

SME-Northern Moravian Energetics (Severomoravska energetika, a.s.) is one of the eight regional energy distributors in the Czech Republic. Until 2000, SME had a dominant market share in these regions. However, SME needed to transform its business models due to competition, client demands, energy distribution changes, and the creation of a free market. SME also aimed to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. After a thorough product study, SME deployed a Siebel eEnergy customer relationship management (CRM) system. Consulting and integration experts from HP Services implemented the entire project, working together with HP subcontractors Nextira One and Autocont in the first phase. For the second phase, Soluziona joined the team.

On-demand CRM has grown up. Once an impulsive reaction against expensive extensive software implementations, on-demand solutions continue to grow in size of deployment, level of functionality, and demands of users. In the past six months, both Siebel and Right Now announced new on-demand releases to support expanded adoption beyond the sales and customer support team to a broader user base. Other new competitors and point solutions have emerged to support specific CRM needs. And users are finding that on-demand is not a no-brainer: if users dont see value and learn to use it, its a bad decision.

The $624 million-asset bank currently does not have the technology or software to do that. Customer relationship management software “would create the ability for me to know” what products to push to which customers, he said.

CRM, at its best, organizes the different areas within a bank, including information from branches, to create a unified memory of a customer and instructions on how to treat that customer. Many banks are finding that CRM software is becoming a must-have marketing tool.

Community banks are pretty good at knowing what their customers need, but their customer service and marketing efforts are often unstructured, said Kathleen Khirallah, TowerGroup’s research director of retail banking. “What a CRM system allows them to do is get it organized,” she said.

While developing a CRM system in-house is not realistic for most community banks, there are a wide variety of options available in the marketplace, ranging from the simple to the intricate. Forming a strong partnership with the right outside vendor is essential to success with CRM, bankers and experts say. But navigating the seas of CRM software options can be daunting. Here are six steps banks can take to help guide their CRM software purchasing decisions.

Step 1: Assess Your Needs and Expectations

The first thing banks should do when considering CRM software is to determine the banks overall CRM strategy. Be clear about the goals of the organization, Khirallah said.

The term “CRM” can be vague and far-reaching. It can refer to methodologies, software, or Internet capabilities that help manage customer relationships in an organized way. The term is frequently used to encompass every interaction a bank has with its customers, especially all processes and procedures with the goal of customer service or sales.

The bottom line in all CRM systems is improved profitability, but banks can choose to reach that end through many different means. That could include cross-selling products, working with existing household information, managing entire relationships, growing lending, or growing deposits. “Most people want to do all of the above,” said Steve Kayser, senior vice president of marketing for COCC, a community bank outsourcing , development, and consulting company.

Paul Driscoll, executive vice president of $2.3 billion-asset Beneficial Mutual Savings Bank in Philadelphia, said that when his bank begins to look into CRM software, the planning group will be a combination of people at the bank, including representatives from technology, marketing, and banking. “It will be a mesh of all that … an enterprise-wide project,” he said.

At this stage, banks should also decide who should be responsible for purchasing and implementing the CRM software. Khirallah suggested that two people at the bank, the head of business and the head of I.T., handle the project. “TowerGroup refers to this team as ‘Gemini pairs,’” she said. “This project cannot be delegated solely to the I.T. group.”

Step 2: Decide Which Options Are Critical

At this point, banks should decide what they absolutely must have in terms of CRM software. They should also develop a list of important, but not critical, needs, and a list of things that would be nice to have in a system, like add-ons.

There are many levels of CRM software on the market. Weissman breaks the software down into five levels, ranging from basic to advanced.

The simplest systems just keep track of basic contact information. “It’s basically an elaborate, nice, telephone book,” Weissman said.

The second level has the ability to track contacts. These systems take the concept of a universal telephone book and add the ability to track telephone calls, meetings, and e-mails. This and the universal telephone book are stand alone, meaning they don’t integrate with other databases in the bank.

The next level brings in account data. On these systems, when a bank employee looks up a customer, he or she can not only see the customers contact info, but also can look at which accounts the customer has with the bank.

Bringing in profitability data is the next step. At this level, the CRM system moves from one that houses information to one that creates information. These systems offer “an income statement for each account that each customer has” to show the bank “how much money they are making or losing for each account,” Weissman said.

The highest level is a fully integrated CRM system. That’s where the CRM system is incorporated into the sales and marketing database system and allows for analysis of each customer relationship for each account. Systems at this level look at customers to determine what new products to offer them. Systems at this level also have the ability to bring in external data, such as information on demographics and business graphics.

“We are firm believers that, at a minimum, you should have a level four” system, Weissman said.

Most experts and software providers agree that the best form of CRM software is enterprise wide. Enterprise-wide CRM systems interface with all of the bank’s other systems, so that the information flows through the entire organization. “If you’re going to do (CRM) right, you need the whole institution to play a role,” Kayser said.

Step 3: Match Your Needs With Software

After determining the bank’s needs, the next step is to conduct due diligence to match those needs with appropriate vendors and services. Some vendors can match their technology with the software needs of many institutions. Other providers specialize in a certain area, which may or may not match the area of a bank’s focus. Either way, banks should require all vendors being considered to demonstrate how their software can meet the bank’s expectations.

“Work with a number of vendors to match your goals,” Kayser said.

Banks should “cast a wide net” in this stage of the process, Khirallah said. She suggested evaluating about 10 different vendors at this point. Consulting groups can assist banks with vendor selection. Industry associations, such as America’s Community Bankers, also offer resources that can help. ACBs Buyers Guide, which is available online, provides contact information on 14 providers that offer CRM services to community banks.

Step 4: Narrow Down Choices And Issue RFPs

At this point, banks should narrow down their vendor choices to about three or four. They should look for CRM software vendors with proven track records of success, Kayser said. They also should look for state-of-the-art technology.

“It’s important that they deal solely with financial institutions and have a very good knowledge of what financial institutions need and of the competitive landscape,” Weissman said. “They should understand things besides CRM at banks,” like teller systems, help desks, and the call center side, he said.

Banks should look for vendors that focus on financial institutions of their size, Khirallah said. She also recommended that banks visit the clients of the vendors they are considering, even flying to an out-of-town bank for a day visit. Once there, Khirallah said, ask the clients a series of questions about their CRM system, including:

• Was the CRM software easy to install?
• What did the training entail?
• Is the system working as you expected?
• How is the vendor to work with?
• Was the vendors pricing accurate, or were there hidden costs?

Are you happy with the system?
When issuing request for proposals, banks should be specific about what they are looking for, and make sure all questions and requests are addressed.

Step 5: Evaluate the Vendor Proposals

“The biggest mistake is buying CRM based on how pretty the screen is,” Weissman said. “The screen should look pretty good, but what’s behind the screen?” he asked. Questions toask include:

Does the system have profitability assessment and analysis?

Is it based on relationship creation, not customer or house holding?

Does it have a data warehouse for historical data?

Does it include retail and commercial?

Is it providing external data?

Is it integrating all that into a consolidated view of the customer relationship?

Is it a fully integrated system?
A strong partnership between the bank and the vendor is key, Kayser said.

Costs are big with CRM software, but the return on investment can be even bigger. There is a broad range of costs for CRM software. Cost is variable, based on the number of users and the size of a bank’s database, Khirallah said.

“These are not inexpensive systems,” Kayser said. Costs depend on how much software the bank wants to deploy, what pieces they select, and how much help on the implementation side is needed, he said. Costs can range from $50,000 to $250,000, and can reach up to $5 million for large banks, he said.

“It’s a real wide range,” Weissman said, adding that there are systems that are affordable. “We work with banks that are very small and very large. Our CRM is affordable to the small guys,” he said.

In Grant Thorntons 2005 survey of community bank executives, 64 percent said updating or expanding technology to better track customer needs was important to their bank’s success, yet only 33 percent were confident about their performance in that area.

Step 6: Implement the CRM System

Utilizing, not just having, a CRM system is critical, Weissman said.

“One reason projected CRM returns are not being fully realized is because over 75 percent of companies are not fully using CRM once it is implemented,” according to Doing CRM Right: What It Takes to Be Successful With CRM. a 2004 study by IBM.

CRM is done right less than 15 percent of the time across the globe, according to the survey, which polled more than 370 companies across all industries.

“Differentiating steps are not the big-ticket items, such as technology implementation or customer data integration , rather, they are the human-oriented steps such as change management and process change,” said the IBM survey.

“Work with someone who is going to do all the set up for you,” Weissman said. A key part of CRM training is working with the bank over the long haul to leverage the potential of the system, he said.

Access is extremely important, Weissman said. “Frequently I see banks make this purchase and give only a handful of employees access. That makes no sense,” he said. “You have to get this out to all the people that have direct customer contact… or what’s the point of having it?”

Full-blown implementation is a fairly long, detailed system, Kayser said.

Choosing and implementing CRM software is not the last step in customer service. Community banks still need to keep constant communication open between their employees and their customers, Kayser said. Implementation training should include a mix of vendor and business unit training, Kayser added.

“This is about process. This is about workflow. This is about overall knowledge level. You need great people training, along with great skills and a great system.” Kayser said.

Even With Technology, It’s Still About People

Community banks should emphasize training and incentives over technology when it comes to implementing a customer relationship management solution, said a May report from Celent Communications, a Boston-based research and consulting firm serving the financial industry.

Also, “success isn’t defined by deploying the software, but by customer-oriented goals,” said the report, Branch Automation: The Convergence of Teller, Platform and CRM, which focused on banks with less than $1 billion in assets. “Setting a strategy, training your front-line staff, providing proper incentives, and being able to measure and reward based on those incentives drives a successful CRM implementation.”

While technology shouldn’t dominate the discussion, it can play a role in cutting costs, the report said. Smart client technology, for example, can improve the response time of teller workstations, allowing banks to eliminate costlier branch servers, the report said. Instead of relying on individual servers for each branch, a bank can install “smart clients” that interface directly with a centralized server.

In addition to boosting the speed at which a teller can access customer information, a smart client gives tellers offline functionality, which is not available with branch servers. If a branch server repair, “someone from I.T. must go to the branch to repair the server. This can be both costly and time consuming and can lead to extended periods of downtime at the branch,” the report said.

As existing branch automation systems grow obsolete, more banks will begin to upgrade their technology with options such as smart clients, Celent said. However, “the market is warming up, but is by no means hot,” the report said. As upgrades do progress, according to Celent, community banks will tend to purchase complete branch automation solutions from their core vendors. “These customers don’t have the ability or budgets to undertake integration or customization projects and will prefer a single source,” the report said.

Pharma Markets OnlineInternetNews.com - Jul 29, 2005…"[As an industry] we have not done a very good job realizing how the Internet and [customer relationship management applications] can be targeted," Stern said …Six Steps for Successfully Buying CRM SoftwareCIO Today, CA - Jul 29, 2005… Customer relationship management software"would create the ability for me to know" what products to […]

One of the biggest myths in metadata management is that it’s synonymous with master data management. While metadata refers to data that describes other data — like data type and field name — master data is shared across systems like lists or hierarchies of customers, suppliers or accounts.

The bloodletting in call centers, CRM and Web-based customer self-service has shown that a CTO can’t simply install a piece of software and expect it to start improving things; Web applications and call center automation will grow smart enough to improve a business’ value proposition only when they work in concert.

Customer self-service Web applications built without regard for other contact channels have placed many companies in the position of showing customers internal inconsistencies and inefficiencies. One service channel often doesn’t synch with the other, and neither takes full advantage of data in back-room systems.
Companies trying to improve customer relationships through Web-based self-service and other channels should consider business rules management technology as a means to resolving their technical issues. Newer technology such as Web services can help integrate numerous applications to give business managers control of customer- facing information technology (I.T.).

That control enables companies to respond nimbly to changing market demands. A layer of smart business rules can coordinate a customer self-service Web application with call center customer relationship management (CRM) applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to present a coherent face to customers and business partners.

These abilities make business rules an intriguing possibility for improving customer service systems on the Web and within the enterprise.

What Are Business Rules?

Business rules are the practices, processes and procedures that define how a company does business. In many ways, rules are the essence of an organization and define its true value proposition. They could be best practices, procedures, policies, or even physical limitations.

For example, a typical business rule is “our company will accept a product return and will refund the purchase price within seven days of the purchase.”

Process rules are business rules in action. Process rules or policies define how businesses execute rules, and in which order. For example, a business rule might be that customers have the ability to interact directly through the Web application to update a systemwide shipping address.

A smart business practice rule might be something a little more complex: “If a customer is a valuable customer or engaged in an order fulfillment process using the Web application, then leverage the more expensive interactive address change; otherwise leverage the batch transaction.”

This rule can be reused by the call center, ERP, order-processing fulfillment, shipping and other applications. All these systems have to do is call the address change process made available by the smart integration software and the appropriate back-office transaction is executed.

Advanced environments can delegate these practices, policies and decisions to business owners outside of I.T. These environments enable the change, validation and deployment of these rules to enterprise systems in Internet time, not I.T. time.

Why Current Systems Need Help

The bloodletting in call centers, CRM and Web-based customer self-service has shown that a CTO can’t simply install a piece of software and expect it to start improving things; Web applications, call center automation, etc., will grow smart enough to improve a business’ value proposition only when they work in concert by accessing business rules backed by intelligence, in order to make nuanced decisions.

The first step in this process is to examine the business processes that govern internal and external interactions and to codify best practices. Best practices are the collective knowledge of a company’s best managers. Manageable business rules can add this collective intelligence to business process management (BPM) so that the Web self-service system, along with CRM, ERP and supply chain automation, amounts to more than simply another way to connect existing processes.

Organizations need to reach beyond “simple” BPM and extract their policies as rules that will allow for smarter process automation and for a new level of control over the business processes themselves.

Recent rollouts of the Web self-service, ERP or CRM system may have made it easier to look at the data in the system; but when are these systems smart enough to go beyond guiding users through complicated tasks? When can they fully automate complex workflows between systems, enabling users to change them, if necessary, mid-stream?

Simple BPM systems are built to report the status of current processes and nothing more. Such systems will stretch only so far to accommodate rules without changing the Cobol or the ERP data model involved.

Automating and resolving work with a smart rules-based BPM system can eliminate up to 80 percent of the manual steps in existing CRM, ERP and supply chain management (SCM) or billing systems. This would allow managers not only to identify problems but also to change workflows mid-stream to accommodate changing market forces.

Integrating rules into a company’s Web systems, as well into its I.T. architecture, makes all the systems smarter and more responsive. Rules-driven smart systems analyze facts in real time, understand if more information is needed, and drive processes consistent with management’s direction.

Web services technologies, such as simple object access protocol (SOAP), are creating integrated portals and browser-based control that give a rules architecture consistency across an enterprise.

A browser-based interface that places management outside of I.T. creates centralized management and distributed access to the rules of a business. This extends best practices and common processes beyond the self-service application, throughout the coordinated enterprise.

Customer Service in Internet Time

In the zero-training environment of the Web, it is critical to guide the interactions of people and company processes. A rules- oriented approach gives this guidance on the Web and everywhere else.

Best practices embedded into a single, separate-rules layer extending across all channels, rather than in an individual application or database , enable a business to change dynamically and consistently based on the nature of the specific request, providing customers and staff with direction at the right time, all the time.

As previously mentioned, an enterprise might use Web services to extend address change transactions, depending on the circumstances. There are two methods for changing addresses: nightly batch operations and interactive transactions with an ERP system.

Each has different throughput and cost. General address changes can probably be handled batch, but if a toptier customer needs to make an immediate high-margin transaction using the new address, the company wants that transaction executed immediately. Here the business logic determines which method to use and when it must be coded in both applications.

Rules would give the systems the intelligence to pick one process over another. The company could expose both of these transactions across departments using Web services to tie together its call center and customer self-service Web applications.

A flexible rules engine will layer the business logic above the UDDI (universal description, discovery and integration) level, and afford business users the agility to change the engine’s rules in Internet time.

Business rules and process management technologies enable the application to leverage new transactions, policies and best practices as they become available, without having to initiate a development cycle. Adding a decision rule for when to use a new transaction puts best practices to work immediately without the application knowing anything has changed.

Combining rich process, integration and business rules engines can enable the agile business to build Web-based customer self-service systems that support fluid business practices and high-quality customer interactions .

With the increased agility provided to the business users and the better efficiency awarded to I.T. organizations, enterprises can start reaping value on investment, as well as on their customer service, SCM and ERP applications’ forecasted ROI

Six Steps for Successfully Buying CRM SoftwareCIO Today, CA - 21 hours agoWhile developing a CRM system in-house is not realistic for most community banks, there are a wide variety of options available in the marketplace, ranging …Search B-EYE-Network.comB-EYE-Network, CO - 13 hours ago… Claudia is the president and founder of Intelligent Solutions, a leading consultancy on CRM and […]

July 28 Amcat Technology Wins CRM Excellence Award by Helping Mobile Phone e-tailer Reduce Customer Churn EDMOND, Okla.,

Arun Sumanarian spent many nights in his hometown of Madras, India, studying hard to become a graduate student in the United States. His parents called it “The Dream.” So when Sumanarian arrived at the University at Buffalo as a master’s student in computer science two years ago, he didn’t think he’d be choosing to leave America right after graduation.

A research report by Summit Strategies achieved a new high in market-analysis hyperbole in July when it suggested that Salesforce.com has an opportunity to become the ‘Microsoft of the on-demand software world.’

Maximizer Awarded 2005 CRM Excellence Award from Customer Inter@ction Solutions http://www.maximizer.com Vancouver, BC, July 29, 2005–(T-Net)–Maximizer Software Inc.

Roy Balkus, vice president of technology for Naugatuck Savings Bank, has a ‘huge mountain’ of data on the bank’s customers. ‘

Electronic anti-theft devices have been installed in vehicles cars for years — such as the LoJack, which gained fame during countless TV commercials. Soon, similar technology will be used in the clothes you and your children wear.

Research and Markets :CRM Software Spending and Trends: Small and Medium Size Businesses adopt CRM Solutions for the (Business Wire via Yahoo! Finance)Research and Markets has announced the addition of CRM Software Spending and Trends to their offering

Siebel Systems reported a further drop in license revenues in the quarter ending June 30. Revenue rose four percent on last year, but restructuring charges forced the vendor to post a US$50 million net loss, compared to net earnings of $7.5 million last year.

Over the last decade, the main focus has been on production and how to optimise this part of the value chain by using ERP systems. More recently, the focus has shifted to other parts of the organisation.