CRM Fundamentals

CRM Fundamentals are designed to help you cut through the hype and quickly get up to speed on important CRM related issues. To jumpstart your search across the information, we have organized our information and interactions into the following categories.

1. Strategic CRM.
2. Technology and Implementation.
3. Mobile Business for the Enterprise.
4. Sales & Marketing.
5. Business Intelligence.
6. Customer Contact Centre.
7. eCRM.

1. Strategic CRM. A comprehensive implementation that provides seamless coordination between all customer-facing functions by integrating people, process and technology to maximize relationships with all customers. Here, we discuss these terms as they relate to Strategic CRM.

	Business Case - Borrowed from business school terminology to document the strategy, goals, metrics, and resources needed for CRM implementations.
	Customer Knowledge - Companies should strive to develop a complete picture of the customer by actively gathering, organizing, and analyzing customer data.
	Customer Loyalty - Companies strive to create brand-loyalty between their customers and a particular company or brand.
	Customer Retention - The value derived from a particular market segment. CRM strives to increase sales by retaining valuable consumers and by retaining a secure customer base to counteract competitor activity.
	Customer Satisfaction - Are your customers happy? Measurement systems should be put in place to measure customer satisfaction.
	Direction - What companies hope to accomplish by implementing CRM and which components will be needed at each level to achieve the implementation.
	Leadership - A champion in senior management who will advocate for the CRM implementation in its various stages over a number of years.
	Master Plan - The overall guiding methodology and metrics for a CRM implementation from start to finish.
	Metrics or Measurement - Benchmarks set by a company to measure the success or failure of a project or a web site.
	People - The most difficult component of CRM to get right. Users who do not understand the CRM implementation, or have not been properly trained can substantially harm a CRM implementation. People will be the ultimate judges of the success of the CRM implementation.
	Process - An automated system. It is important to review all customer management systems prior to automating their processes, as inappropriate processing will only speed up a flawed system.
	Return on Investment (ROI) - A calculation of how much money will be saved or earned as the result of an investment in a CRM solution. ROI calculations should be used in developing your business case for a given proposal; be sure to factor in investments of both time and capital.
	Strategy - Investigating, implementing, measuring, and maintaining your CRM solution should all be factored into your company's overall business strategy.
	Success - How do you measure the ROI of your CRM implementation? Pre-determined metrics for your CRM project must include measurements of increased profit, decreased spending, and increased market share.
	Technology - Web-based applications, portal offerings, agent technology, n-tiered architectures, and other emerging technologies impact new business functionality.
	Top Management - Business intelligence includes extensive reporting to senior managers on the success and internal adoption of the CRM implementation. It is essential to keep senior managers informed and involved in the fight to sustain the CRM implementation across the enterprise.
	Trends - New and noteworthy directions affecting employees, process, and technology issues.
	Vision -A broad and comprehensive game plan for a company's future that takes into account both the business goals of a company and the technology projects needed to support a company's long range planning.

2. Technology and Implementation. You know your company needs a CRM software package, but how do you implement it and what technology will you need? When properly implemented, CRM breaks through the traditional boundaries separating sales, marketing, service, IT and other functional areas. An overall, flexible enterprise architecture plan is required to enable seamless integration of CRM systems, as well as the alignment of ''e'' and traditional channels into hybrid technology systems.

	Enterprise Architecture and Applications - The plans, methods, and tools aimed at consolidating and coordinating computer applications across an enterprise. An enterprise (or company) typically has existing legacy applications and databases that stay in use while adding or migrating new applications using Internet, e-commerce, extranet, and other new technologies.
	CRM-induced culture change - After companies implement a Customer Relationship Management system, they often feel the effects of what is called CRM-induced culture change resulting from the influence of CRM on behavior patterns across an organization.
	Migration management - Successfully migrating the use of one operating environment to another operating to a better operating environment.
	Knowledge-based utilization - An expert knowledge management system containing a collection of facts and rules needed for problem solving.
	Application Service Providers - (ASP's) are outsourcing specialists for software applications that offer enterprises access to applications and related services over the Internet. This is an alternative model to loading software in personal computers or on enterprise servers. Designed to minimize the headache of buying, installing, managing, and maintaining the software.
	Connectivity -Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that offer businesses connections to the Internet.
	Application Servers - Three-tier integration application tying together graphical user interface (GUI) servers, application (business logic) servers, and the database.
	System Integrators - Integrates an organization's old "legacy" systems, or connects them to new net markets. Also known as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) providers, integration architects, and data integrators.
	Back-end Integration - Application integration with IT back-end chains - inventory management, accounting, shipping, etc.
	Planning and Investigating - Just getting started? The first stage involves research, business case writing, metrics setting, etc. This section contains articles and research papers regarding vendor's solutions and the methodology
	Implementing and Deployment - Now that you have chosen your solution(s), this information helps you plan your implementation and deployment strategies.
	Change Management - Just because you have implemented and deployed a solution does not mean that you will automatically see ROI. This stage of project management is critical to your success.
	Maintaining and Upgrading - The Internet has enabled maintaining and upgrading CRM applications much easier. But don't upgrade every point release - learn here what you should do.

3. Mobile Business for the Enterprise. Mobile technology and Field Force Automation (FFA) are integral components of any new CRM implementation. Mobile technology allows field sales, support and service personnel to access critical customer and company information, send and retrieve data, and interact with colleagues and customers. New applications will give birth to innovative customer-facing sales and service channels. Mobile wireless devices connecting CRM and FFA applications ensure that information is always up-to-date and available to mobile workers.

	Delivery Technology - Transmission technologies that enable the sending of data to and from mobile phones, fax machines and/or IP addresses. Examples of data delivery technologies include Edge (Enhanced Data GSM Environment), GPRS (General Packet Radio Services), and SMS (Short Message Service).
	Display Technology - Enables your wireless device to show text, graphics, and images. Currently, most display technologies holds less than 100 characters total.
	Field Force Automation (FFA) - Automating tasks and delivering content to employees who are in the field visiting customers.
	Input Technology and Devices - Operations, programs, and devices that transfer data to or from mobile devices including voice recognition, touch screen, handwriting recognition, traditional keyboard, and a mouse.
	Mobile Commerce - The buying or selling from a mobile device i.e. buying and selling stocks from your mobile phone.
	Mobile Enterprise - Making the Intranet, CRM solution, etc. available to mobile employees.
	Mobile Operating System - An operating system specifically for mobile devices.
	Standards - Specifications for a set of communication protocol.
	Wide Area Network (WAN) - A network of connected devices that are geographically dispersed.
	WAP and WML - Wireless application protocol and wireless markup language, these are syntax used to program content for wireless phones using languages that allow the text portions of Web pages to be presented.
	Wireless Application Service Provider - ASP's specifically designed for wireless devices. WASP's allow customer access to the service from a variety of wireless devices.
	Wireless Devices - Devices that use electromagnetic waves (rather than wires) to carry a signal.
	XML and Voice XML otherwise known as Extensible Markup Language. Syntax to deliver all types of voice content to devices.

4. Sales & Marketing
Sales is a multi-channel selling system that relies on a combination of field sales, retail, partners, call centers and electronic channels. The goal is to make the customer the focus of sales efforts by integrating customer needs into channel and product strategies via forecasting, push support, up-selling, personalization; and by embedding service into products using networked sensors, microprocessor intelligence and wireless communication. The Five PowerSkills of Relationship Management are: positioning, hunting, coaching, leading, and farming.

	Enterprise Relationship Management (ERM) - Often used interchangeably with CRM, this term is often used by Enterprise Resource Planning or "ERP" software vendors such as SAP, Baan, Oracle and PeopleSoft.
	E-Sales - Revenue generating functions of an Internet strategy.
	Lead Qualification - Automation that pre-qualifies leads according to pre-established business rules before they are entered into a system.
	Operational CRM - The "Operational" components of a CRM Strategy include Sales Automation, Call Center Automation, Channel Automation, and Proposal Generation.
	Partner Relationship Management (PRM) - Third party sales channel automation capabilities such as Lead Distribution, Web based wholesale merchandising (catalogs, product configuration, order management), promotions and discounts, collaboration and planning, measurement, billing, product returns, etc.
	Repeat Business - The ongoing and recurring revenue stream generated by an existing customer base over time.
	Sales Force Automation (SFA) - Basic Sales Automation capabilities including Contact, Account, Opportunity, Activity Management, Proposal Generators, etc.

Marketing consists of corporate branding, customer acquisition, customer retention and customer loyalty programs. Marketing now involves blending online and off-line media channels, and leveraging Internet-acquired customer information with marketing automation to drive the B2C and B2B selling processes. This is the age of the "eCustomer," going beyond traditional sales campaigns to identify, profile, and engage in an ongoing interactive dialogue with customers through your web assets.

	Analytical CRM - The analytical components of a CRM strategy include data marts, decision support tools and customer behavior modeling, and analytical tools. The customer data that is captured within the "operational" components of a CRM system is stored, retrieved and analyzed for performance management and results measurement.
	Customer Profiling and Segmentation - Used to describe all activities and system capabilities that capture large amounts of customers' information in order to do a more effective job of "segmenting", or dividing, the customer base. The customer base is first segmented by the value they represent to an organization, and then by the needs they may have for specified products/ services.
	E-Marketing Automation - An umbrella term including campaign management, customer analytics and "closed loop marketing" that track the effectiveness of various marketing programs and campaigns.
	Lead Qualification - A term used to describe certain marketing and sales automation capabilities that pre-qualify sales leads as they are entered into a system governed by pre-established business rules defined by the organization.
	Personalization - Personalization and Content Management enable you to target and tailor communications. Personalization includes all aspects of making the customer interaction a unique and beneficial experience, wherever the interaction takes place.

5. Business Intelligence. (BI) is the intersection of the needs of the business and the available information necessary to make the best business decisions. BI information sources include the internet, the extranet, the intranet, OnLine Transaction Processing systems (OLTP), Operational Data Stores (ODS), Data Warehouses (DW), Data Marts (DM), Analytical Applications (AA), data mining applications, statistical analysis applications, predictive modeling applications, reporting systems, and data islands (isolated sets of data such as spread sheets, desktop databases, etc.).

	Analytical processing and Analytics - Using data to produce a research and analysis of a business case. Analytics are frequently used to support or disprove management decisions.
	Customer Intelligence Systems - Provides companies with information about the purchasing preferences of their customers. These systems are used to identify potential customers and retain existing customers; as well as to determine which products and services should be promoted to various segments of the customer population.
	Customer scoring - Tools used for the continuous monitoring of account data and customer behavior.
	Data Cleansing - The process by which "dirty" or corrupt data is removed or corrected.
	Data Marts - A specialized smaller version of a data warehouse. A data mart is typically created by a department to address a business function.
	Data Mining - A technique using software tools geared for users who typically do not know exactly what to search for; but are looking for particular patterns or trends. Data mining is the analysis of data for relationships that have not previously been discovered.
	Data Warehouse - A central repository for all or significant parts of the data that have been collected by an enterprise's various business systems. Data warehouses can be used as repositories for consistent historical data that can be easily accessed and manipulated for decision support.
	Dimension - A table used in a star schema to store descriptive, hierarchical and metric information about an aspect of the business. Examples include product, customer, geography, and time.
	DTEAMM (Design, Transformation, Extract, Access, Monitoring and Management) - A transformation engine based, client server computer application that provides for most aspects of data warehouse and data mart system design, construction, utilization, monitoring and management.
	Filtering and House Holding - The process of eliminating data based on selection criteria and a methodology of consolidating names and addresses.
	Information Database - A database containing corporate information for analysis purposes such as customer phone numbers, credit info, etc.
	Legamart - A non-architected repository of data gathered from operational data and other sources (data mart) that business users rely upon.
	Meta Data - Simply put they are data dictionaries and repositories. Meta data names and describes data that is modeled, migrated from source data, captured and stored in the data warehouse and accessed by users.
	ODS (Operational Data Store) - A database designed for queries on transactional data. ODS's are also commonly used to populate data warehouses and data marts. Common sources of the data include legacy systems that contain current or near term data.
	OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) Processing that supports the analysis of business trends and projections.
	OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing) Daily business operations such as order entry.
	OODBs (Object Oriented Data Bases) A database that allows the storage and retrieval of multiple data types.
	Operational Data - Supports the modeling and creation of data as objects.
	Operational System or Database - A term used interchangeably with legacy systems; Operational Systems are an information or transaction processing system used to store data that is important to a business on a day-to-day basis, including administrative, employee, financial and other data.

6. Customer Contact Centre. The customer contact centre integrates customer touch-points and provides service through one multi-channel gateway. The customer contact centre, whether it is a help desk, a call centre, or on-line support via email or chat, is how your customers experience your organization. Customers leave the customer contact centre experience with either positive or negative feelings towards your company.

	Call Centre and Help Desk - The department that handles customer inquiries typically via telephone, fax, or email.
	Customer Interactive Centre (CIC) - Help desks and support environments that are highly interactive. CIC leverages technology, human resources and methodologies to create raving fans while utilizing eService and eSupport for outstanding customer satisfaction.
	Customer Retention - Processes that identify, prioritize, and improve areas of performance that have the greatest impact on customer loyalty. Keep as many customers as possible, keep them satisfied, keep them loyal, and keep them for life. Measuring their performance over time and against competitors, how they drive customer feedback through the organization to build lasting customer relationships.
	Customer Support - Provides timely, expert support to resolve customer problems and queries sent by email, phone, fax, or in person.
	eService system - A sophisticated scripted online help system and/or a knowledge base of technical notes and previously offered customer solutions. eService is a Customer Service Center management system that allows customers to find solutions on their own.
	Live Support/Service -Customer service representatives who answer customer questions via the telephone in real time.
	On-line Support/Service - On line support from an internal help desk, allows businesses of any size to dramatically improve customer service by providing employees access to problem resolution information through Intranets. An external help desk allows customers to access customer service information through the Web. Both systems enable companies to resolve problems faster, leading to improved service and greater overall customer satisfaction.
	State-of-the-service technology - An eService plan.

7. eCRM. eCRM is not simply electronic CRM. eCRM is customer management for e-Businesses that must confront the complexity of managing sophisticated customers and business partners in a variety of media including: online and offline media, personal contact, and more automated and electronic forms of communication.

	E-commerce - Sales and services via the Internet. Sometimes confused with to e-business that is an umbrella term for a total presence on the Web including the e-commerce (shopping) component.
	Channel Automation Software - Modules or platforms that empower the channel, by enabling the channel to engage in Web-based commerce. These solutions enable manufacturers to coordinate and manage the sale of products and solutions across multi-channel sales and distribution channels. As a result, customers are able to transparently navigate a multi-tiered selling process, gaining the value-add of both manufacturers and channel partners.
	Collaborative Commerce Software - software that aggregates fragmented buyers and/or sellers to increase a market's efficiencies beyond the exchange of goods. C-commerce moves beyond that level of support to enable multiple enterprises to work together online within a dynamic trading community.
	On-line Storefront - Websites on which companies sell products or services via the Internet.
	Multichannel Customer Management - the integration of electronic interactions including email, chat, self-service, collaboration, Voice-over-IP (VoIP) with voice interactions in a seamless manner delivering a universal queue for all interactions, and fronting the interaction engine with a desktop CRM application.
	Eservice - An umbrella term for services delivered over the Internet. Includes e-commerce transaction services for handling online orders, application hosting by application service providers (ASPs) as well as any processing capability that is obtainable on the Web.
	Email Response Management - An application that uses agents to read and respond to email messages. Includes an email response library containing a series of standard texts to deal with common issues.
	Guided Selling and Buying - Leveraging traditional applications for configuring and cataloguing -- with layers of dynamic, customer-friendly capabilities--to guide customers through the process of selecting a product. Organizations use guided selection functionality to accomplish multiple objectives, which vary depending on the nature of the company, customer, and product.
	Product Configuration - The ability to self-configure a product or service over the Internet. Complex configuration solutions typically allow product managers to create business-based rules such as "If package A is chosen, then it should include components 1, 2, or 3." A salesperson or channel partner would use this consistent interface to begin a sale but customize it with specific products and pricing preferences.
	Order Management - Online order management is much more than simply a solution for automating the online order-taking process, vendors are extending order management functionality and tightly integrating with other sell-side functional areas. The online order management system must not only simplify the process of taking orders on a Web site and feeding the back-end systems, but also must track the entire order life cycle. Information housed in the order management system is incredibly valuable to supply chain partners, customers, and resellers. As a result, integration--both external and internal--is essential to fully realizing the benefits of an online order management system.
	Electronic Agents -Agent programs search the Internet gathering information you're interested in and bring (or push it) to your desktop. Also known as "bots" or "push technology".
	Catalog Management - software applications that normalize product data from multiple vendors for easy comparison. Includes information about data sets, files, databases and the devices on which each data set or file is stored.
	Content Management - refers to the printed word online, including documentation, information pages and data that describe items offered in online catalogs or marketplaces.
	Ecustomer - Business or consumer customers who goes through the online customer transaction process. An ecustomer implementation can be direct to the end-customer or incorporate distribution channels such as resellers or distributors.
	Fulfillment software - Executes tasks such as bill of materials, order management, shipping management, returns and status tracking.
	Self-Service - Customer facing applications that allow customers and partners to access information, track shipments and solve problems by themselves.

Last modified: September 01, 2003