Selecting CRM Software and Hardware Vendors
There Are a Number of Vendors Specializing in CRM Technology
Jul 22, 2009
Mergers and acquisitions impact the CRM vendor market, however, guidelines for selection of software and hardware can provide evaluation techniques for organizations embarking on a new CRM strategy or modifying and upgrading an existing system.
The vendor selection process, particularly in the area of packaged software, must be conducted with corporate priorities as a key criterion, coupled with the desired functionality.
Checklist for Vendor Selection
Technology choices should be based on a structured and detailed comparison between a reasonable number of qualified vendors, by following these basic steps:
- Establish a selection committee
- Liaise with all departments
- Develop an initial shortlist of suppliers
- Analyze requirements and establish priorities
- Develop a checklist
- Select software/hardware to evaluate
- Develop a prototype to demonstrate operational functionality
IT Services
IT services may encompass a range of facilities, including: consulting, systems integration, and management of IT and business functions. These services enable a number of CRM activities to be performed, including:
- Multi-channel, intelligent interactions between an organization and its customers and trading partners
- Analytic and interaction management software for eBusiness interactions
- Intelligent customer interaction
- Specialized functions for specific sectors such as retail, packaged goods, transportation, and manufacturing
- Data profiling software to restructure and cleanse data prior to inputting it into a data warehouse
- Software solutions to assist organizations to better manage customer and partner relationships
- Hardware platforms for data warehousing
- Database management systems
- Software that helps organizations to address client retention, cross-sell, up-sell, acquisition, churn, channel migration, and optimization
- Seamless integration among customer, financial, supply chain, and employee management systems
- Multichannel eBusiness applications and services that enable organizations to create a single source of customer information to facilitate managing customer relations across multiple channels -- web, call centers, field support, resellers, retail, and dealer networks
The value to an organization of data warehousing and the supporting technology tools that are components of a CRM solution, is multi-dimensional, and multi-faceted. An enterprise-wide data warehouse serves as a central repository for all data used in an organization and therefore simplifies business relationships among departments by using one standard. Users of the data warehouse get consistent results when querying this database and understand the data in the same way without ambiguity.
Support for CRM
Data warehousing has evolved rapidly and continues to be a very fast-moving, fast-changing market segment. At one time, there were no tools to support data warehousing applications or CRM solutions, and only one way to design and architect a data warehousing system. Now there are a myriad of technology tools to choose from and a variety of viable data warehouse system architectures.
Where the “top down” approach to the design of the data warehouse was once the only option, we now have an architected “bottom up” approach that greatly enhances the chances of success for those sites not well-suited to the “top down” approach.
The Successful CRM Solution
Given an appropriate architecture and a suitable approach to the goal of the enterprise data warehouse, combined witht an intelligent selection of technology tools, a data warehousing project team can deliver a high impact, high value, high ROI, data warehousing system. This system will provide the basis for a CRM solution that will enable the enterprise to benefit significantly from improved customer relationships and a CRM strategy that places the customer first.
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