
Authoritative.
Strategic.

Jacob Dudzinski has been CIO of the Copyright Agency in Sydney for four years. Over the past two years, he has been responsible for a business process and systems improvement program.
Last year, the two hot customer relationship management trends to watch and adopt  were social CRM and mobile CRM. To find out whether they will continue to dominate the CRM landscape and what other trends organizations should pay attention to, CIO.com talked to leading CRM solution vendors and analysts. In the process, we came up with eight CRM trends to watchÂand implement in 2012.
There's no question that every company needs a solid pipeline of business - that's what gives you predictability, profitability, and consistency. The question is: How do you get more pipeline?"
Paul Aldridge, CIO of Genomic Health, Inc., wanted his technology team fully focused on supporting a next-generation network for cancer research. Yet with each user requiring logins for as many as a dozen software-as-a-service (SaaS) sites, password management such as lookups and resets were chewing up their time.
Next year will carry big expectations for Customer Relationship Management systems (CRMs).
It is just on 10 years since Salesforce.com unveiled the first preview of its customisable online customer relationship management (CRM) software at the annual DEMO conference in California. DEMO had previously been the launch platform for ground-breaking technology such as Netscape Navigator, Sun’s Java and Adobe Acrobat, but attendees in February 2001 would have had little idea that they were witnessing something that would turn the world of customer management software — and enterprise software generally — on its head.
A day doesn't go by without headlines about cloud computing, virtualization, and the next computing platform. No doubt these computing models are important, but when it comes to CRM - what's important about cloud computing? And how should platforms be evaluated for CRM applications?
CRM systems have large and intricate databases that describe customer interaction, and most of the effort goes into recording and managing the ongoing conversation between your firm and the customer. CRM systems have information about prospects, customers, e-mail/phone conversations, sales opportunities, and post-sale support. But look inside most CRM systems, and there's very little information about collaboration among your employees: just basic profile identification information and a dozen settings. In most CRM systems, it's difficult to see the totality of a user's activities: the system's focus is on the customer and the development of a deal, not about the conversations happening between users and their attempts to leverage information across your company.
At the core of customer relationship management is "who am I talking with?" In a simple SFA or CRM system, it's obvious: you called them, or they called you. But in enterprise CRM, it's tricky to identify exactly whom the interaction is with, and every new data source seems to make it harder. The problem occurs at two levels: contact information blur from multiple databases, and avatar confusion from multiple entry points into your company's web and social networking sites. This week, we'll cover the top layer of the problem.
There isn't a sales force in the world that says it has enough Leads. And you won't find many marketing VPs who want to do fewer campaigns. So there's a never-ending stream of new leads, prospect interactions, and conversations to be stored in the CRM system. At companies in consumer markets, open source software, and other categories it's not unusual to find a million leads or more. But that's just the beginning: if you're using the latest marketing automation system, every e-mail, web download, and prospect response is recorded in the CRM system. And if you have a large call center, every call and e-mail exchange should be recorded well.
Despite spending many billions of dollars on Customer Relationship Management projects, poor customer service is still pervasive. Those projects that have succeeded have recognized the central role of a process-oriented approach. By understanding and supporting both the processes within the organization and those that exist between the fi rm and its customers, the enterprise can reduce costs, take agility to the next level, and at the same time, build truly effective relationships that customer’s value. (1) The net result is top line growth at the expense of competitors, all the while driving down costs. Read on.
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