CRM or BPM?

Last week I had the chance to travel to beautiful Cambridge, MA.  Years ago AT&T sent me to MIT for various business courses, but I hadn’t been there in years.  Coming from Orlando with its 100 plus degree days it was a pleasure to walk by the Charles River along with many others.  The weather was perfect and I wasn’t the only one enjoying the gorgeous day.

I was in Cambridge to visit with Pegasystems, the leading BPM (business process management) software leader.  Pega (as they are known) boasts major customers including Bank of America, three or four of the “Blues” (Blue Crosses) and many others.

BPM automates common work practices — and since many companies are like silos — marketing is independent of sales is independent of engineering is independent of shipping, most processes that cross departments (and don’t they all?) get there via email, voice mail, forms, excel spreadsheets. . .  Even when the systems are the same the receiving department has to proactively pull the work into their world.

BPM not only automates processes across organizations, but using quality improvement methods and workflow automation work gets done faster and more efficiently — thus saving time and money.  In the world of government regulation (such as Sarbanes-Oxley aka SOX) where companies had to keep a tighter track of financial information for auditing purpose) being able to not only automate processes, but to track them becomes a necessity.

Pega is #1 in the BPM software world with their  SmartBPM® product.  Their president, Alan Trefler was named “Computer Software Executive  of the Year” at the 2009 American Business Awards.  So in the world of BPM they are not only the market leader, but the thought leader.  Pega is the leader in the Gartner Group “Magic Quadrant” for BPM.

Recently Pega has dipped its toe into the CRM (customer relationship management) world with their solution CPM (Customer Process Manager).  They have build a contact center customer service support module on top of this BPM engine.   While certainly not a “threat” to the more complete CRM vendors who go beyond the customer service space, the Pega solution is the next logical step for CRM.

Today’s CRM solutions are, for the most part, records based.  Whether we’re talking of Siebel (Oracle), Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics CRM they all start by creating a record.

Remember those corporate silos I mentioned a few paragraphs ago?  All that great customer information winds up “usable” beyond the CRM application only if it is in a field in said record.  Otherwise that valuable customer “gold” becomes embedded in notes that a CSR or sales rep makes of the contact, and are only available to those who sit and read those notes.

What Pega’s CRM does well is to integrate end-to-end customer-facing processes across not only departments but existing applications.  If you already have Siebel and an (enterprise resource planning) ERP solution and a (supply chain management) SCM solution you can bring in Pega underneath them to streamline the hand off of a sale or problem resolution across organizations.  Over time you can begin to implement some of their desktop apps that can be very easily modified on the fly.  The power of Pega’s ability to pull this off is shown in their 50% plus growth in the last year.

The most amazing thing about Pega is that they are aimed at the big companies –  1,000 plus users.  Many CRM applications simply can’t scale to large implementations, but Pega can — and it does so based on an open architecture (java).

Pega does have competitors in this new CRM hybrid space.  Chordiant and Sword Ciboodle (a really excellent offer from a Scottish company who is making inroads into the States) to consider along with Pega if the process oriented CRM approach makes sense in your company.

The traditional CRM vendors have noted the interested a hybrid BPM / CRM approach and all have some iteration of it on their product roadmaps.    If you’re interested in the CRM world, take a look at Pega, Chordiant ans Sword Ciboodle to get a feel for your future.

The Lazy Hazy CRM Days of Summer and the Holy Grail of Unified Communications

This is the first entry in awhile.  After my last blog the folks at IT Toolbox asked me to begin a blog for them on the topic of CRM.  “Making Cents and Sense of CRM” is focused on how CRM has gone from being the next great invention to improve corporate ROI since the invention of ERP (enterprise resource planning) into a mess of all kinds of applications that have nothing to do with one another (from sales force automation (SFA), to customer service, to business intelligence, to contact center. . .).  You name a solution and no doubt someone has called it “CRM.”

This mis-use of the term has caused the market to falter.   Why would people buy something when they either don’t know what it is supposed to do, or when it over promises and under delivers?

I think this is where the expression “duh” aptly fits.

So as I sit in Central Florida in 100 plus degree heat (farenheit) pondering how soon I can get back to the beach or at least the pool I’ve been focusing on the question of whether we need to “re-label” real CRM or whether we can save it with a hail Mary pass?

That “hail Mary” may be tying CRM with Unified Communications.  We’ve discussed this a little bit before — how the ability to provide accessibility to people where ever they are from a  “virtual” office phone or email address makes the ability to improve customer service. . .but let’s take a look at some “real world” examples.

Toshiba just announced their  Unified Communications Suite, Strata® CIX™.   ShorTel (a VoiP vendor) recently linked their UC to their call center quality assurance processes.   Why are vendors big and small suddenly jumping on the “CRM / UC” bandwagon?

Well, a survey by Computerworld Hong Kong showed that users are worn out from accessing multiple communications points (email, voicemail, cell phone, office phone, etc.) only to be bombarded by people that keep them from getting their work done, while getting to important things and people “too late.”   The survey found that 55% were using IM (instant messaging), 42% were using video conferencing, and 29% were using person to person tools that were created original for home use (like Yahoo! and Microsoft Messenger).

While hte survey shows that people need UC (and may even WANT UC) they still don’t understand what it is!

Forrester Research also conducted a survey and their’s showed that most small and large companies still are uncertain about the benefits of UC!  Forrester surveyed 2,187 North American companies and 55% (55%!) were confused about what it was, let alone its value to them!

Wow, here we are contemplating how to get CRM out of the mess of “what is it and why do I care?” when it has enormous potential to improve the bottom line, when unified communications perhaps has a faster ROI (probably less overall over time, but a huge, quick payback for UC) but no one knows exactly why!

Amazing!

Granted the economy is confused right now and some companies are in panic mode — but this makes both UC and CRM even more compelling given the ROI — especially with a shrinking workforce.  Yet 55% are confused about the VALUE of Unified Communications?

Wow, we are sure lousy communicators!

Ellen Daley, (the Forrester Research analyst who authored the report) said: “There’s been a 21% increase in UC pilots since 2007 but no increase in firms buying UC. A lot of people are talking about UC, a lot more are tipping their toe in; but at the same time they’re all saying they’re not sure about the value.”

Folks, we can’t throw technology at a problem and hope that fixes things!  UC and CRM both hold enormous potential for companies but ONLY if correctly applied to a specific business NEED.  Pilots alone are worthless if the pilot isn’t part of a business problem and specific success criteria applied to the pilot.

Far too many IT vendors sell to the TCM (telecommunications manager), or the CIO (Chief Information Officer) or some other technical manager.  Definitely we need to be talking to these folks, but the REAL buyers of UC and CRM are in Marketing and Sales.  These areas are outside of the comfort zone of man typical IT sales person.

UC and CRM vendors need to move up the totem pole and start cross selling into sales and marketing (and perhaps even the CFO and CEO).  If you don’t know how to get there and have a compelling story when you do — prepare to fail.  Sit by the beach or pool in these lazy, hazy days of summer and prepare to sit there during the blizzards of February (or in my case, Disney’s Blizzard Beach).

If you lack the ability to get outside of IT you’d better partner with someone who can.

Or we’ll attend the funeral of your awesome CRM or UC product — along (perhaps) with the whole field. See you at the beach!

The Irony of it All

My last blog posed the question:  “Is Microsoft the next Dinosaur?”  My point was that most companies have a lifecycle, just like products do and people do.

Microsoft may or may not be at the precipice of a decline — it is really up to Microsoft.  The thing I always admired about Bill Gates in the “early days” (and I was a UNIX fan since I worked for AT&T Computer Systems) was that he was always paranoid.  He knew the internet could eclipse the OS as far as the center of the IT universe and so out came Internet Explorer.  Microsoft tried to win the search engine war — and after repeated lack of success has what looks like a nice product in Bing.

But no sooner did I post my Blog and get lots of comments (most not so nice from Microsoft proponents) along comes PC World with an article that asks the very same question I asked: 

Is Microsoft Following GM’s Road Map?

Analysis: GM’s bankruptcy marks the end of an era. Is Microsoft repeating the automaker’s mistakes?

J. Peter Bruzzese, InfoWorld

// Jun 3, 2009 6:00 pm

“Microsoft has faced a few serious bumps over the last 10 years but came out fine. . .Knowing the work Microsoft developers put into their products, I believe they are the saving grace of the company — as long as they are allowed to hear the voice of the people. This is an area where I’ve seen a problem.”

I worked for AT&T at the hey day of Bell Labs.  We had the brightest, most awesome minds around — just like Microsoft does today.   Microsoft ca be its own best friend or its own worst enemy.  Only time will tell.

Analyzing your customers is key to profits

It seems as if business is always undergoing  transformation.  We’ve gone from TQM (Total Quality Management) and BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) to Six Sigma and ISO.
We’re always trying to improve because quality = profits.  (This is a little like that old chestnut that time is money.  Time IS money and so is the channel and sales method you use in the time that you have).

In these times of a tight economy  — caused partly by our global economy where things can be made more cheaply in China, India and other countries,  this increased globalization means your competition is also gobal and may be able to produce products more cheaply than you can.  They are targetting our top customers.  Think of Toyota compared to General Motors and now translate that to ALL industries.  It is happening and to stay competitive you need to become more efficient.

Add to globalization the leveling of the playing field thanks to the internet.  Now small companies can compete with large and reach the same customers.  Mom and pops are as much your competition as the global firms.  Add to the internet and globalization the ideas of cost management/reduction, restructurings, mergers, etc.  Change, nothing but change!   This dynamic world has impacted the competitive landscape by:

• More cemptition for profitable customers,
• More demanding customers less likely to be loyal,
• Custoer sophistication requiring quick access to service via multiple channels.

All of the above makes it critical that companies understand their current and prospective customers from both an economic and behavioral perspective. Many medium and large sized companies think they have embraced customer relationship management (CRM) as an important element of their corporate strategy.  But have they?  CRM is not just a call center automation application or giving your sales reps a laptop with funnel tracking software.  If a company doesn’t know which products are selling and which aren’t they are losing money.  If a company is spending millions on automating the sales reps but don’t know what the cost is to keep that rep in the field compared to the margins and revenue that rep is generating it is about as useful as throwing money out of a window. 

To take advantage of CRM programs (Siebel, SAP, Microsoft CRM, ePiphany, Salesforce.com, Oracle (now owner of Siebel), etc.), companies have to do more than invest in customer-facing solutions such as sales force automation, customer service centers, marketing automation, business to consumer (B2C) Web sites and others.

While these applications help facilitate better service and more efficient interaction with customers through each respective channel they don’t add much to the bottom line if they have been implemented as independent, nonintegrated solutions. As a result, they have yet to achieve several important CRM objectives, including:

• One view of the customer in a vacuum (if that),
• No consistent and thus accurate customer information across the enterprise,
• Duplication of service and sales efforts (costly and possibly irritating to the customer),
• Islands and silos of information that is untapped.

If companies don’t have integrated customer information that they analyze to interpret which customers are profitable and then leverage that information they cannot apply the customer analytics (e.g., propensity to buy, channel preference, churn analyses, segmentation, target marketing, etc.) required to deliver real value from CRM.

Duplicate Customer information or one view of the customer?

Whereas CRM was the great hope of the late 1990s now the bloom is off the rose.  There have been many articles published about the high failure rate of CRM projects.   Many companies bought front office CRM applications (like sales force automation) but it is like buying a horse without a saddle — or a car and then neglecting to fill the tank with gasoline — they didn’t have an end to end CRM plan in place.

Far too many companies have implemented new CRM technologies without changing the basic processes for serving and interacting with their customers.   If you throw technology at a problem without doing basic TQM / BPR (or Six Sigma) to determine what is working and what is not you are doomed to failure.

 If you throw technology at sales and customer service but your customer still can’t get one answer about his or her account you are losing the battle for their loyalty. 

If you don’t know who is profitable and who is not you are losing money.

The companies who have failed with CRM have not truly understood what CRM is and can be.  They were sold point solutions rather than a continuous loop solution that manages the front end of sales and service and the back end of analyzing how well it was done, how profitably and what can be replicated for others.  

As a result nothing changes.

Well, something might change.  Your company may be less profitable. 

Using business analysis to track your sales results  will tell you what your sales force is doing right and wrong) turns into revenue- and cost-drivers of the business, thus a user will quickly see if the sales force is spending too much effort on low-value deals, or if the revenue stream has high exposure by being composed of just a few very high-value deals. In other examples, a user could see what percentage of target his district has reached compared with the same time last year, or determine the impact lapsed customers will have on this quarter’s revenues.

By the same token analyzing what your customers are buying (and aren’t buying) enables companies to understand and optimize the value of their customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Using business intelligence companies can track and analyze key customer segments and loyalty metrics and use this analysis to create an optimal customer acquisition, development, and retention process. Once you know who your customers are, who is profitable and who is not business managers can  see critical changes within the customer base and quickly take action to improve the status of those customers. For example, a user might identify high-value customers who are spending less over several months, and feed that group of customers into a campaign management system to run a retention program.

CRM business analytics measure customer value at both the individual and segment level, at the current customer and potential customer based on demographics, too.  In the end it enables users to understand the changing behavior of groups of customers over time. Users can even drill down to the profile of individual customers to discover their signature, that is, the pattern of their individual behavior, segment membership, and value.

 Analyzing your customers is the key to CRM and it is the key to profits.

CRM doesn’t mean all customers are created equal!

In recent years many jobs in the United States have been outsourced and off-shored with the thought that reducing costs results in higher profits.  You’d think that would make sense.  But it doesn’t.  Not all customers are created equal and the highest profits come from a handful of customers.  In the “old days” this was known as the 80/20 rule.  80% of sales come from 20% of customers is the old chestnut — and it had more than a kernel of truth in it. Businesses today can’t take a “one size fits all” approach to their customers had hope to be profitable.   Funneling everyone through a touchtone interface (press “1″ for sales, “2″ for service) and a contact center agent who doesn’t speak English very well is illogical and will result in a loss of sales.  With all the data at hand today we have the ability like never before to analyze who are profitable customers are and to target them.   CRM and “1 to 1 Marketing” are often mistaken as Communism — treating all people alike.    The opposite is true — you should spend more money on your profitable customers — and less on those who don’t add to the bottom line.  The secret is in using the data that you have and turning it into powerful, actionable revenue producing information.