It is undeniable that the most critical activities in any company revolve around customer relationship management (CRM), because your company's reputation rides on every contact. However, effective CRM pulls many diverse company resources into play to provide the service and attention necessary for successfully closing sales and meeting customer needs -- creating the potential for an integration nightmare.
Answering this call for help is OnContact Software's recently released OnContact Client Management Software (CMS) 4.0, which promises to seamlessly integrate your company's resources with a single front-office application for your marketing, sales, and customer-service needs. In fact, this update to CMS adds the capability to define custom workflows and consolidate all of a customer's interactions in a single view -- along with flexible integration options and a problem-tracking and reporting module.
The workflow and customer-view enhancements are critical to solidifying the services aspect of your CRM implementation. For example, a customer calling for help on a malfunction knows well the history that brought him or her to this point -- and has a reasonable expectation to find a similar awareness on the other side of the line. If your customer service representatives fail to demonstrate awareness of this history, there's potential for permanent customer dissatisfaction.
Providing this high level of service can't be done using traditional transaction-oriented applications, because they lack the capability to flexibly handle ongoing relationships and workflow. So the addition of workflow and consolidated customer views is critical.
In my tests of CMS 4.0, I was very impressed by its exceptional flexibility to embrace dissimilar technical environments and to convey targeted information exactly where and when it is required.
As a front-office solution, CMS doesn't compete with Web-based and client-driven software from Inference, Edify, ServiceSoft, Serviceware, Primus, and Moss Micro. But tight integration with existing resources such as enterprise resource planning systems, myriad databases, and Microsoft's Outlook gives it the depth of some high-end solutions from Baan, Onyx, and Siebel.
Tackling implementation
Installing a front-office automation product such as CMS is not a simple task: In addition to the trivial operation of installing the software, you need to integrate its functionality with your existing technical infrastructure -- and organizational working habits.
For example, your salespeople need access to customer transaction histories, which implies links to existing databases and applications. Also desirable is e-mail, computer-telephony, and fax-systems integration.
Thus, setting up a CRM system can mean creating a new vision for your company's data and technological gears, with the objective of providing better customer service. Turning your transaction-oriented data into this new, service-oriented view requires a coordinated effort among affected departments, the IT personnel, and quite possibly a helping hand from the vendor.
Once those critical logistic needs are satisfied, you can turn your attention to building (or importing) your contact database and defining that mesh of relationships and processes that your company's policy and workflow demand.
CMS provides the necessary tools to facilitate this initial setup, including tools for importing contact information from an existing database or attaching the information to the corporate e-mail system. However, some of these tools are not very user-friendly and may be best tackled with vendor assistance.
I tried -- without success -- to import data from one of my databases, and after a sequence of frustrating dead-ends, I called the vendor for help. Once I explained my problem, I was politely but firmly reminded that some customizations require vendor-provided training and know-how. I had a similar experience trying to integrate Microsoft Outlook with CMS.
However, linking CMS to your company's pipes will probably be a one-time event. Whether you choose to train your staff or use vendor support, it requires additional time and cost that you should plan for.
Key customization tools
The good news is that using two key components -- Agent Designer and Forms Painter -- was a completely different experience than the initial setup. Agent Designer and Forms Painter define sequences of operations for an activity and the subset of data from the corporate database that you want to associate with it.
The combination of Agent Designer and Forms Painter gives CMS the flexibility to work by your company's rules -- a key strength. These two components provide you with a high-level, GUI-based programming language that you use to create all of the necessary logic and the data associated with your customer relationship activities.
For example, using Agent Designer, you can create an agent to schedule a follow-up call or generate an automatic e-mail message to the account manager every time a client calls for technical support.
CMS agents can contain conditional logic based on data fields selected within Forms Painter. The agents are automatically triggered when the user selects an activity associated with that agent. For example, you can design a view showing the history of all customer contacts, and a SQL query associated with that agent will extract the history from your database.
How to make knowledge stick
One of the criticisms that challenge IT staff most often is that they indulge too much on the technology at the expense of the information content. That criticism appears to have some merit if we consider that the gigabytes of information stored in our corporate databases are often held captive by inflexible access rules that make unscheduled requests difficult to satisfy.
However, solutions such as CMS bring that enslaved knowledge out to where it is most needed: the front end of your company, where stores of information can be put to work for your sales, marketing, and support departments.
Once I completed the necessary piping to my existing infrastructure, I had immediate access through the user component of CMS to information that could be easily shaped to serve a new purpose: customer service.
CMS' view of a company's data revolves around the concept of "enterprise." You view and define each of your customers via an Enterprise window in which obvious transactional data, such as name, location, and addresses, walk hand-in-hand with a company profile. The company profile is where you store marketing data such as industry classification, number of employees, and dollar sales.
Again, the content and the format that CMS displays in each window can be easily personalized to your company using the administrative tools. In addition, you can program CMS to import or display data from your existing databases.
Enhanced customer view
I was able to quickly insert a new client record into the system thanks to an easy-to-use GUI that takes advantage of drop-down fields to speed up data entry and even make corrections as you type. After completing my record, a prompt asked for contact information.
Entering a new contact triggered CMS to propose an activity window, where I could schedule an action to follow up on that contact. My options let me define the activity (phone call, e-mail, etc.), assign a person responsible for that activity, set up an automatic e-mail message at the completion of the activity, and link that activity to a marketing campaign or a sales opportunity.
In minutes, I had a new Enterprise window with my customer's basic information and the contact, along with follow-up activities that were already scheduled. This integration is where solutions such as CMS shine: It brings together a wealth of information that you can use to serve your customers better.
CMS 4.0 also offers a support module called CMS Service to record technical support calls using the same enterprise-oriented philosophy. You can easily activate the new module with a simple right-click of your mouse on the Support tab in the customer's Enterprise window, which opens up the Incident window. From the Incident window, you can easily enter the details of each incident, assign a solution for the problem, and suggest a sales opportunity.
For example, in my hypothetical PC reseller scenario, repeated support calls for a PC that failed to restart graciously after a power failure suggested the opportunity to sell an uninterruptible power supply to that customer -- for the benefit of the sales personnel.
