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Introduction:
• You define customer as-
• Your paying client
• Your employee
• Your supplier or vendor
• Your partner
Examples:
1. If you are running a company, then you have paying clients. Against the payment,
your provide them products and/or services.
2. You have got employees. You give them a pay check and other benefits including
bonus and in return, they give you productive work.
3. You have got suppliers. They give you products and/ or services. In return, you
give them money.
4. You have channel partners. They give you added value services. In return, you
give them some services or money.
In short, customer is an individual or group with whom you exchange values.
Definition of CRM:
‘Customer Relationship Management is a comprehensive approach for creating,
maintaining and expanding customer relationships’.
Significance of the words used in the definitions:
a) Comprehensive: CRM does not belong to just sales or marketing. It is not the
sole responsibility of customer service group or an IT team; i.e. CRM must be a
way of doing business that touches all the area.
b) Approach: An approach is broadly a way of treating or dealing with something.
CRM is a way of thinking about and dealing with the customer relationship.
We can also use the word ‘strategy’ because CRM involves a clear plan. In
fact, CRM strategy can usually serve as a benchmark for other strategies in
your organization. Because any strategy sets directions for your organization.
We can also consider this from a department or area level. Just as a larger
organization ahs strategies for shareholder management, marketing etc. Each
strategy must support managing customer relationships. Thus CRM is strategic.
To realize this, one can make a list of key strategies, to brief your area of
responsibility. Then write down organizational approach towards customers.
Compare the CRM strategies with other strategies. They should support each
other.
External customers are those outside the organization who buy goods and the services the
organization sales. ‘Internal customers’ is a way of defining another group in some
organization whose work depends upon work of your group. Therefore, they are your
customers. It is your responsibility to provide what they need so that they can do their job
properly.
c) Customer relationship: Finally let us see what we mean by ‘customer
relationship’. In today’s world where we do business with individuals or groups
with whom we may never meet and hence much less know in person to person
sense. CRM is about creating the feel of comfort in this high tech environment.
Operational CRM: This is an ERP like segment of CRM. Typical business functions
involving customer service, order management, invoice or billing or sales and marketing
automation and management are the parts of operational CRM. Till now, this is the
primary use of CRM. One characteristic of operational CRM is the possibility of
integrating with the financial and human resources functions of ERP applications. With
this integration, end-to-end functionality from lead management to order breaking can be
implemented.
CRM engine: This could be the customer data repository. The data mart, the data
warehouse is the one where all the data on customer is captured and stored. This could
include basic stuff such as your name, address, telephone number, birth date etc. It could
also include more sophisticated information like how many times you have accessed a
particular web site and what you did on the web pages you accessed. It could also include
the help desk support and the purchase history. Ultimately, the purpose is a single
gathering point for all individual customer information so that a unified customer view
can be created throughout the company departments that need to know the data stored in
this CRM engine house.
Front Office Solutions: These are the unified applications that run on the top of the
customer data warehouse. They could be sales force automations, marketing automation,
or service and support customer interaction applications. In the client server environment
(and now in the internet environment), they provide employees with the information on
the basis of which the decision of ‘what is to be done?’ or ‘What next is to be done with
the customer?’ is made. The more specific applications provide an element of self-service
for the customer.
Enterprise Application Integration: They sit between back office and front office. They
also sit between the newly installed CRM system and old systems implemented by the
enterprise. They permit CRM to CRM communication. They are pieces of codes,
connectors and bridges that as a body are called as EAIs. EAIs provide messaging
services and data mapping services that allow one system to communicate with different
other systems regardless of their formatting.
CHAPTER 2: e-C.R.M.
Introduction:
eCRM is the term that some people have used to describe the customer facing portion of
the CRM. The term usually implies capabilities like self service knowledge bases,
automated e-mail response, personalization of web content, online product, bundling and
pricing etc.
eCRM gives the internet users the ability to interact with the business through their
preferred communication channel and it allows the business to offset expensive customer
service agents with technology. So the value is largely one of improved customer
satisfaction and reduced cost through improved efficiency.
Internet architectures are very difficult to realize in practice. Perhaps, the company that is
purchasing CRM system has a long history of using SAP or has built its own internal
system or has both client server and mainframe systems at multiple sites. This sort of
problems can create a disaster unless there is some way of dealing with the problem, the
internet architecture can provide.
The strength of PeopleSoft architecture is elegant approach for integration using the
concept of available enterprise integration points (EIPs). The idea of EIP is central to all
internet architecture. They are open, standard pieces of reusable code that provide the
developers with preprogrammed means to communicate with internal systems and other
PeopleSoft systems. In SAP’s world, they are called Business Application Programmers
Interface [BAPI]. PeopleSoft provides these EIPs through their open integration
framework. OIF is a multifeatured framework that provides foundation for various
interactions between systems. It consists of the following parts.
1. Application messaging: This is the publish/subscribe model for communication
and synchronization between one system and the other. It works with XML
messages that the other systems don’t have to have knowledge of. When a
specified business event occurs, the message is created and sent to any number of
users who have subscribed to that message.
2. Business interlink: They are internet versions of what has been called as
enterprise application integration. Through the use of C, C++, or JAVA, these
business interlinks are plug-ins that identify the transactions, wrap themselves
around third party API and them allow data to pass to or from third party. It saves
you from the trouble f trying EAI application if it works well.
3. Component interface API: The components are easily recognizable interfaces in
the business world such as a sales order, invoice etc. The interface is the ability f
architecture to recognize the document in other party’s form and pass PeopleSoft
data to that form. It can be done through the same languages and protocols as
business interlink and CORBA and EJB.
4. PeopleCode Java: These are specific Java classes provides for programmers who
are interested in Java.
5. File layout object and application engine: PeopleSoft uses application engine for
large scale batch processors. The file layout object is a metadata representation of
a flat file whose data is in either an XML format or delimited by columns or
delimiting characters.
6. EDI manager: This is useful for systems that use EDI rather than XML. When an
incoming EDI transaction is recognized, it is translated to a PeopleSoft business
document and then processed.
7. Open Query: This is a tool and it allows third party applications to communicate
with PeopleSoft. This is a classic representation of well functioning internet
architecture. It is mature, ready to work with the third party system and as a whole
sophisticated enough for any sized enterprise.
8. Occupied real estate: The pure internet application normally rests on the server
with browser as zero code clients. The web enabled content applications need
downloaded applets and applications to desktop to carry out a specific function.
9. The feel: With the browser as the client, it is easy to feel that access anywhere and
anytime. Because all the functions are accessible transparently.
10. Back-end code: While CRM is considered front office technology meaning that
the applications are available to the customer and the impact of the customer,
there is a back end to the front office i.e. to develop eCRM, development tools for
the web that use HTML, JAVA, JAVASCRIPT, EJB, PERL or XML are the
ground work for introducing ‘e’ before eCRM.
Chapter 3- Sales Force Automation [SFA]
Introduction:
SFA i.e. Sales Force Automation is designed to help salespeople, acquire and retain
customers, reduce administrative time and basically make sales people’s activities
something that earns them and their company profit. SFA has the following purposes.
1. Increased Revenue: Quite obviously, gross income in the profit (i.e. improvement
in the bottom line) is the main goal of implementing SFA. But it is not just the
sufficient answer to SFA’s success. Just as important is the increase in revenue
per salesperson and in the gross profit per year. If you have an increase o 100% in
sales revenues but your cost of sales has increase or it strictly came as a result of
your increased sales force, your SFA implementation fails.
2. Reduction in the cost of sales: This doesn’t stand for reduction in force (meaning
fewer employees which obviously means to you). But in this case, we are talking
about a reduction inn the amount of time that is used by the sales people in co-
ordination of their efforts, continuous data entry and often unsuccessful attempts
to extract and interpret data without the tools to do so. Studies show that salestime
to fulfill administrative functions is almost half of a salesperson’s activities. By
reducing the time engaged in these administrative or other non-sales related
efforts, the cost of the sales is reduced. This is one of the most successful results
of SFA.
3. Customer retention due to company: If your customers are happy, they will stay
with you even if they are paying a bit more. It is not about the money but about
the relationship with the company and often the relationship with particular
salespeople within the company. SFA’s benefit is to provide you with a view of
the customer that allows an intelligent salesperson or a company to understand the
value of the individual customer through customer history and communication
with the company. Though it can never be a substitute for personal interactions, it
can provide the intelligence and the view to better plan how to actually do good
things for your clients.
4. Sales force increasing mobility: The sales force is out of the office most often.
They have to do many duties like meeting customers, moving through airports etc.
This is making mobility a competitive issue requiring effective mobile tools such
as internet and hand sets.
5. Easily available customer information with single view: Multiple apartments may
have interests in viewing the status of the customer account or opportunity. For
e.g. the sales department wants to see the status of the opportunity. The
accounting department wants to see the status of invoicing and billing for the
same account. The marketing department wants to see reports on varying degrees
of success/failures of their campaign with individual account within each
department are individuals with different roles who have their own agendas. The
vice president of sales wants to see all the activities of all salespeople in his
department. He also wants to get a sales pipeline report to refine his sales forecast
for the coming quarter. The accounts manager does not need that much
information. He wants a national view of all sales activities around the accounts
he owns. The sales manager wants to see the opportunity progress but not all the
contact lists of each salesperson. Each salesperson wants to manage his customer
accounts. Each of them has an individual view that allows them to see all the data
they need to see; but at the same time there is a universal view of all the data
available to all departments at all time.
Data synchronization-
One of the most important technologies is data synchronization. It is the process
of updating information among unconnected computers. Each synchronization system
gets data that confirms with the data on any other system far away.
Sales people in the field can maintain subset of master database and update their
local data while others are working with same data simultaneously. Synchronization also
allows corporate managers and sales teams to share information created by field sales
people such as meeting notes, schedules and forecasts.
Important recent sales trends related to the mobility and wireless data make
synchronization even more important. There are several points which are to be
considered.
• Sales people operate spending more time out of the office with customers. Many
sales people are telecommunicating [i.e. working out of their homes rather than in
corporate branch offices].
• Sales people operate as members of sales teams and as products become more
complex and technical, the need to share information grows.
• Entire sales and marketing organizations are using computer based customer,
sales and project based information more effectively. Field people can use this
information to close sales faster and managers can access this information input in
the filed. This means that for SFA, data synchronization becomes most essential
piece of technology.
The data synchronization process-
Data synchronization takes up a fair amount of network infrastructure bandwidth. It
actively involves a lot of what comprises the corporate information system, to take
example of Sales Logix data synchronization system which is one of the most
sophisticated CRM data synchronization systems in the market.
Working of SalesLogix data synchronization system is as follows-
Dia.
Field sales people with laptop computers need to download relevant subset of data
manipulate and update data and need to synchronize changes with new information from
host computer database. The typical process of synchronizing data between remote and
host system requires several basic steps as shown in the figure.
Remote databases are created for mobile salespeople and branch offices. Each database is
a subset of corporate database. It will contain information needed by only that particular
salesperson; e.g. information on filed salesperson’s laptop is only pertaining to his
particular account. The synchronization system tracks the information pertinent to
particular salesperson to both remote database and host database. Remote salespersons
can connect to home office using low bandwidth modem or WAN connection.
Salespeople or managers who are at desk can connect via their local area network. Log
files are exchanged that contain information to be updated in respective database. After
connection is completed, new data is supplied to each database and should have up-to-
date information. It is estimated that using localized version of data synchronizer [where
only updates are done], 50% of the communication cost can be saved.
Introduction-
Campaign management-
E-marketing’s great strength is campaign management. This is the creation of
personalized marketing efforts that not only engage customer or prospect but also engage
entire enterprise in effort and provide single view of activity to any department or
segment of the company. The campaign management features of technology are end to
end. They plan and monitor all activities including-
a. Identification of prospect
b. Generation of lead
c. Prospect and customer information captured
d. Lead qualifications
e. Distribution of leads to appropriate segments
f. Campaign planning
g. Campaign execution [e.g. promotion, planning, event etc.]
h. Response management
i. Refinement
j. Channel management [joint marketing campaigns]
EMA campaign methods don’t seem very different from traditional marketing methods.
The difference is internet. EMA use Internet to capture, extract and analyze information
about each customer and each market segment. It then gives the company the design tools
to plan, monitor and refine its marketing campaigns to the level of individual within
market segment. EMA tools also provide consistent, continuous representation of a value
proposition across multiple channels. The field, the call center, the web and internal
departments all see a single view of the customer due to tight interaction between front
office and back office. EMA workflow allows all parties to see exactly what they are
permitted to see in all marketing campaigns as they evolve. No one is left out of the loop
and thus mistakes can be minimized.
Diagram-
This seems very simple and short; not too much information. Not much until one
realizes that United Airlines has millions of customers and the mail was specific to Mr.
Greenberg based on his flying habits. To send him this mail, United Airlines had to
determine the following-
a. He was a customer.
b. He has flown on United Airlines within the last year.
c. He was a ‘mileage plus’ customer.
d. He flew frequently enough.
e. He flew from Washington D.C.’s Dulles airport.
This was sorted and extracted from 10s of thousands of customers flying form multiple
airports in United States daily. One that information was determined, they-
a. Identified Mr. Greenberg with a particular promotion that they thought
good appeal to him.
b. Decided an engagement media that United thought would capture his
attention.
c. Using opt-in methods, they then stated to receive additional offers “ join
the mileage plus email by going to –http;//www.email.mileageplus.com”
This was opting-I permission in the United Airlines-Paul
Greenberg courtship to go from direct mail first base to e-mail list
second base in exchange of some consideration such as 15% off
and double miles.
EMA tools-
EMA tools are distinguished from traditional marketing tools by their ability to capture,
extract and analyze customer information form multiple and often platform independent
sources and relative the results through the web. This can man e-mail, web, direct mail,
fax, voice mail etc. good analytic software can’t only reduce the cost, of customer
acquisition via targeted and segmented results but can also identify these customers who
are potentially going to take their business to your competitors. These tools have to be
scalable. They also have to be rich so they can provide measurement and customization
of matrix to get these measurements. They have to be clear and distinct with reporting
tools that provide you with information. They also have to be fast since they are dealing
with millions of transactions from multiple resources. The tools interpret in-depth profiles
of customers who are accessing websites responding to mails, answering direct mail
campaigns and accessing what is called customer touch points in any way. Touch point
are either active or interaction nodes of customer communication. They are the areas of
customer interaction that are considered central to success of any marketing efforts. The
EMA analysis provides in depth profile o customer performances, buying behavior,
purchase frequency etc. successful analytic tools give organization the view of data that
lets them interpret, identify and capitalize as emerging trends in key markets and focus
their marketing and sales efforts on highly profitable marketing segments. Ultimate result
of all this is personalized customer information.
Let’s have a look at what is done by EMA analytic application of a company
which is a market leader in EMA implementation. These tools-
a. Analyze looking, billing and backlog information. This means revenue can be
segmented by customized sets of criteria which could be geographical or by
industry segments.
b. Leverage data from other CRM and SFA applications to improve sales forecasts,
measures sales process matrix and identify areas of sales focus.
c. Evaluate e-commerce purchasing patterns and website effectiveness. This will
allow the user to identify how successful their e-commerce initiative is.
d. Monitor effectiveness of your customer service agents and systems such as
average cost and time to service requests and profitability and effectiveness of
individual/ call center representatives.
e. Analyze your customer’s care for a clear understanding of customer’s
preferences, buying behavior, loyalty and profitability.
f. Develop customer segments based on profitability and lifetime customer value
and link those to international, national and regional marketing programs.
g. Measure effectiveness of indirect channel partners and programs including
distribution of sales, inventory trends, distributor’s profit margins, distributor’s
sell by product line and channel tracking trends.
As in any analytical application, this data has to be extracted from somewhere. The
development of data warehouse and creation of data marts as customer repositories
are becoming commonplace in the larger CRM implementation. Much of this process
is like traditional marketing. But the use of new media such as e-mail or web makes it
interesting. Interactivity, instant response and little work on part of customer are keys
of this game.
EMA components-
• Promotions- Web integrated marketing provides the same marketing themes
that consumers have always been interested in; i.e. promotions, contests, cross
selling of products, up selling of products and discount coupons. The
calculation is that they will get a long term customer value through repeat
customer’s overtime and that the loyal customers will stay loyal due to other
things [such as excellent services and constant promotions]. In a way, price
increases later on.
• Events- Various vendors have developed EMA event management tools for
capturing customer information through event registration and online
interaction. The web is preferred e-marketing delivery mechanism.
Registration for seminars, exhibitions etc. is possible using internet. However,
even more interesting are webinars; i.e. seminars that are actually conducted
over the web. One highly recommended is a series of newsletters called C-Biz
by Robert Thomson. In that, a newsletter is sent in plain text format each
week to the customer’s e-mail ID after he has given permission to do so by
signing up on his website ‘http://CRMguru.com’. Within the newsletter are
embedded URLs for location on web where you can register for webcast on
some future date. A web-based registration form is filled out and an e-mail
reminder is sent some time before webcast. The customer should have proper
tools and then he is ready to watch live or pre-recorded webinars. In the
meantime, the sponsoring company has captured a qualified prospect.
Registration page that is filled up on corporate webcast sponsor’s page is the
part of e-marketing campaign management toolset, as is the letter received
from Mr. Thomson. The site and the newsletter also provide a valuable opt-in
service by providing consideration with the customer’s task; e.g. if the
customer gives CRMguru names and e-mails of five subscribers, then he gets
an electronic book and whitepaper on CRM or some other forms of
consideration. Other registration and lead management features provided by
most EMA vendor’s registration page include-
o Registration page with opt-in.
o Unsubscribed [opt-out] capabilities.
o User controlled profile managements.
o Lead follow up from trade shows and other revenues.
o Campaigns on trade show floor.
o User group registration and follow up.
• Customer loyalty and retention program- Customer loyalty is much difficult
to retain when all it takes a different URL or a click on tool to switch brands.
Customers are constantly bombarded by next great deal and access to that deal
might not be a great effort. Even if the product is good, there is going to be a
better new generation EMA applications built in those small, personalized
touches that ensures quality and retain customers; e.g. Unica’s affinian
campaign management has templates for the following-
o Birthday greetings.
o Holiday and special occasion reminder.
o Welcome programs
o Delivery of gift ideas.
o Point based programs.
o Win back programs for inactive customers.
Response management-
The campaign is in progress, you have thousands of customers and thousands of
responses from the targeted markets of different offerings. Additionally, you have put
a series of surveys online so that, you can find time to your marketing. During the
course of this activity, there is a lot of data to look at. For this, your response
management activities should be the best. The traditional response management is
tedious even with the use of computers. The time it takes for response gathering
analysis and refinement is too much. Also you must store the information somewhere
and then do the analysis. After the analysis, you need to work through plan for the
next campaign. Since the response gathering is often completed after the campaign is
completed.
This is the point where EMA is appreciated the most using the Internet as a tool that
works in real time, what is now called as a ‘close group’.
Closed group feedback is then heart of internet based response management. It is the
use of internet and the tools to compile extract and analyze information while the
campaigns are in progress. Thus information is generating new information. Hence
the time to gather and analyze information and response to campaign is notably
shorter. Besides this, the EMA response management has following benefits-
a. Information gathering, extraction and analysis time is dramatically reduced.
b. Refinement to the campaign can be done in midstream, improving the possibility
of returns within the existing campaign. It is no longer a lesson learnt for the next
time but instead a chance of success while the original campaign is in progress.
c. Automated tasks free up the labor time for other marketing tasks.
Pre-implementation phase:
Time frame of pre-implementation phase changes from several weeks to several months
according to the depth of preliminary work your company needs to do; e.g. in this time
frame, decision is made to go with the CRM implementation. The criteria are those
functions the CRM software functionality needs to answer and these corporate
weaknesses software and the processes need to address. This is also the phase where
software selection occurs. This is not at all an easy thing, because so many new CRM
choices are hitting the market every day. But if your selection criteria are sharp and if you
have some references to help you identify the established vendor, then your path is
considerably easier. Some of the criteria for the selection are as follows-
• Scalability of software
• Toolset flexibility for customization
• Stability of existing CRM application code
• Level of technical support available during and after implementation
• Upgrade support
• Availability of additional modules such as EMA, SFA etc.
Requirements gathering-
The length of this phase can change if the scope of the project is significantly bigger.
Firstly, because there are a lot more people to interview. Secondly, the complexity of
project means that the requirements phase is more complicated. Regardless of all this,
this is a phase where meetings happen with the stakeholders, other corporate decision
makers and IT staff. In other words, all those who are going to use the system must be
involved in these meetings. This implies that the CRM is going to affect the interactions
of every appropriate department in company; i.e. marketing, sales, finance etc. all have a
direct need to have an input in the team during requirements gathering phase. There are
number of actions necessary during this procedure. This is also the time for discussing
some issues regarding how successful has the sales methodology been or what can be
changed etc. ultimately, whatever the customer wants to carry forward will be
architectured. Most CRM packages are fairly flexible in their toolsets permitting for
wholesale or small changes to the business rules that govern the customer’s corporate
life. Once requirements for front office processes are gathered, the next step is
identification of input and output. This is the way the users will interact with the system.
Some of the questions to be answered in this phase include-
1. Which screens will be needed for input data?
2. How information will be obtained from the system?
3. How will the customer want to work with the system?
4. How many users must system accommodate and how they will connect to it?
While these questions are answered, there is a lot of other work to be done; e.g. what
would be system’s optimal functionality if everyone had their wishes granted. The
difficulty of this part is two-fold:
1. The users unacquainted with what the system can technical do and what not.
Often ask for functionality that is impossible.
2. a briefing of basics of CRM application before requirements gathering is often
useful for these users who are not involved in these strategies. The plan is to
include as much as possible to keep customer happy. But, technical boundaries
and interactions of proposed functionality have a lot to do with ultimate restriction
on what gets implemented.
Development of customization-
Once there are appropriate sign offs on the formal and final document, the next phase is
development of customizations. The typical length of customization is 5 to 7 weeks and it
depends on the following-
• Size of the project
• Complexity of interfaces, workflow and functions
• Availability of the employees/users to work with the team to improve
customizations at a given interaction.
• Technical problems not related with implementation but still effective. They can
be resolved by creating an independent environment for development, esteem etc.
• Midstream workflow and rules changes for customization generated because of
changing corporate business process. They can be managed but still will affect the
timetable and the price.
• Some legal issues which may arise between developer and user by changes in
rules etc.
The next step is to assign tasks for the vendors. An effective implementation partner will
then set up a development environment that mirrors the customer’s site as closely as
possible; e.g. a database is created which is identical with customer’s database. This
means that the success in this environment will indicate likely success in project.
The process initiated in the customization phase will be known to work on customer’s
system simply because they are working as a mock up of a customer’s system. The
project manager is responsible for a project plan at this phase also. The plan is a checklist
of what the developers and what team members are assigned to which task. Based on the
successful checking of these tasks, status reports on the state of delivery reports can be
given to the customer in agreed upon time phase. Depending upon the formalities of the
project, status report can be just phone calls or formal written documents with specific
successes or failures. Throughout this customization period, development team is
demonstrating functionality to the customer and soliciting customer’s response. It is
important that the customer is engaged all the times in the project.
If there are changes to be made, several things must be done; e.g. a clear cut change
management process has to be in place so that both contractors and customer can accept
changes. The change management document should include understanding changes to
statement of work in function also will cause extra cost, will increase deliver time and
due date of total implementation partners for changes.
It also must include workflow that identifies who the authority is that can sign off on the
changes and thus add the changes to budget. Finally data routines are written, screens are
developed and other communications are completed. The final part of this phase is
development team testing; i.e. making sure that the basic system works.
Power user beta testing-
This is where the actual users of the system get involved in finding the systematic
discrepancies that arise when customization is moving to completion and data migration
is being prepared. It is better if the users are more experienced. The first major step in
this 2 to 5 day process is to create a testing environment at the customer’s site. For this,
customer purchases a server that can be isolated from important operating systems and
can work side by side. Very often the systems with the most extensive customizations
exhibit fewest problems in beta testing because they have been checked so extensively
during development. However, to achieve this stage, there has to be a close working
relationship between development team, internal implementation team and IT staff. With
some implementation methodologies, this is the beginning of knowledge transfer with
customer IT staff performing beta implementation. The strengths and the shortcomings of
efforts, what kind of back up resources are necessary, what kind of procedural
automation is still needed and what kind of training will be paramount when time comes
for consultancy services to leave the premises. Once beta implementation is complete and
analyzed then comes tough part i.e. test data import. Before system goes live, there has to
be a full scale test run. It will identify accuracy and usability of data. This must be done
with full participation of customer. The customer must verify the integrity of data
transfer. After gathering last minute usability requests, there is a consistency check for
everything ranging from look and feel of the screen to spelling. Before system hand off,
there is one more phase i.e. training.
Training-
1. basic training- This is the training for the users. This is normally run by the
vendor. There are two ways to do it depending upon which is cost effective.
Either the company can send its users at the developer’s place or could also have
a trainer come to the company.
2. Customization training- This is done by the now-trained employees who have
been engaged in the project. This is done simply because of their familiarity with
system.
3. Documentation training- The consultancy service is also responsible for
providing documentation on customization system to see that the future use is
ensured. Often, as a part of team, these consultancy services will provide
documentation experts who know how to piece together useful documentation I a
very efficient way.
4. Additional training-
a. Train the trainer- As name implies, whoever you send to this course will
be the one who will train the remaining users in your company if you are
customer. Hence it is essential that this particular person is well trained.
b. Integrator course- This training teaches the IT staff of company to make
their own customization with or to consultancy services.
Introduction-
Call center is a place where calls are either made or received in a high volume by 100s of
call center agents sitting together in a large group. The purposes are-
Sales
Marketing
Telemarketing
Customer service
Technical support
Specialized business activity
The set up can be considered as one of the following-
• Huge telemarketing center
• Customer service center
• Help line
• Service bureau
• Outsourcer
Earlier call center was defined as a place where various business transaction were
handled through telephone that used to combine centrally located through telephone that
used to combine centrally located database with an automatic call distribution [ACD]
system.
An agent in a call center means a staff/person who is working in a call center. By seats,
we mean number f people working together at any given time.
Introduction-
An ASP is a company that hosts a software application and rents it for a monthly fee. The
basic value proposition of an ASP is two-fold; firstly, to outsource the headaches and
expenses associated with managing a business applications, thereby allowing its
customers to free up resources for more strategic initiatives; secondly, to enable its
customers to conserve capital by paying a monthly service fee instead of having t make
the large up-front expenditures required to bring enterprise business applications on line.
The economies of scale that an ASP can leverage for their customers are dramatic. Most
companies simply can’t afford to implement the levels of redundancy, reliability and
security. By using an ASP, even the smallest business can gain access to leading business
applications and what are often world-class system infrastructures.
Like any important decision, choosing whether to use ASPs for the business starts
by taking a high-level overview of their advantages and disadvantages. The value
proposition of an ASP is targeted mostly toward small to midsize companies. ASPs give
your business access to leading business applications, implemented rapidly and painlessly
by a fully staffed, remote IT department, all for one fixed monthly fee. Following are
some advantages and disadvantages of ASP-
Advantages-
• Rapid implementation- ASPs implement the same products on the same platform
over and over again. This enables them to become extremely proficient at this
task, even to the point of being able to automate the most repetitive parts of the
process. Because the implementations all happen within the ASP’s data center,
certain application components can be predeployed and/or shared among multiple
applications, to further reduce the human effort and total time required for the
implementation.
• Lower cost of entry and ownership- ASPs rent applications for a monthly fee.
This enables their customers to defer the large capital expenditures traditionally
required to bring applications on line. Because ASPs are able to leverage
tremendous economies of scale by centralizing and sharing resources such as
network connectivity, hardware, software, facilities and human resources, they are
able to pass additional savings on to customers and still maintain substantial profit
margins.
• Reduced people headaches- Its quite true that good people are difficult to find,
difficult to recruit and even more difficult to retain. This has always been true, but
never as prominent a problem as in today’s IT market. ASPs directly address this
business pain point by effectively outsourcing their customer’s IT department, or
at least the part of the IT department required to manage each respective
application.
• Availability- Most ASPs advertise 24/7 uptime for their customer’s applications.
That is, they are on line all the time. This is typically backed up by a service level
agreement which essentially guarantees that the systems of the company stay up
and running or the company starts getting portions of the money back. This is an
especially significant guarantee for mission-critical applications.
• Scalability- The very nature of the ASP business requires that they use high-
performance, scalable technologies. Leading ASPs have invested millions of
dollars to develop a scalable infrastructure because they must be ready to
accommodate the needs of the new economy’s companies. Because it is already in
place, all customers get to enjoy the same world-class infrastructure.
Disadvantages-
• Limited choices- ASPs typically provide a very limited number of brands when it
comes to applications. They are forced to do this if they are going to be able to
produce repeatable, scalable results. Because most ASPs are completely reliant on
the marketing efforts of the actual software vendors t drive brand loyalty, they are
likely to host only the products with greatest market share. These products are not
always the best solution for a customer’s business problem.
• Integration with other applications- Because ASP applications are hosted outside
the enterprise, integration with other enterprise apps becomes challenging. Even
though actual data connectivity between the enterprise and the ASP can be
reasonably robust, the fact that the applications (and the experts who manage
them) are not part of the enterprise’s core IT function makes integration efforts
more complex.
• Security- For all practical purposes, data held at an ASP is very safe. However,
discomfort still exists with many IT managers because not only their jobs, but the
viability of their company depends upon the safety of enterprise data.
• Connectivity- If an application is operating within the enterprise; it would take a
LAN failure to break connectivity to the application. LAN technology is very
stable, and in the event a problem does occur, it can be fixed directly by the
enterprise. When using an ASP, there are several more variables introduced in the
communication loop, including telecom companies. So the problem fixing, if the
problem takes place, becomes even more difficult.