Five Ways Mobile and Cloud are Helping Build Better Bonds with Customers
Creating and maintaining relationships with customers is the basis of the job for those who work in marketing, client relations and sales. For many companies, the success of this also relies on the use of a reputable customer relationship management (CRM) platform, such as the one from SAP.
Even so, some businesses have held back on deploying such software for many reasons including:
- Conflicts among the goals of business departments
- Lack of standardization in business processes among business groups
- No buy-in from management or IT
- Prohibitive costs in deploying and maintaining such a system
- Use of disparate databases among business groups
However, today’s businesses are learning that to be competitive, the whole company must be more collaborative and information driven. And technology is helping provide the necessary information and collaboration through software such as SAP CRM.
To help businesses make the case for deploying SAP CRM, author Vivek Kale has written a comprehensive book, “Implementing SAP CRM: The Guide for Business and Technology Managers.” Kale not only provides a framework for such a process, he also details the project cycle, covers each component of the solution and its tools, offers critical success factors for a successful implementation and describes a new method of assessing its performance.
Kale wrote the book to give business and IT managers a full picture of SAP CRM. He provides a detailed understanding of the solution so that both IT and the business see the benefits of using the CRM. The author explains how the CRM can help transform a workforce into a more customer-focused, responsive business.
In our IT Downloads section, we offer a free excerpt from Kale’s book, Chapter 2: Customer Relationship Management CRM) System. This is an integral chapter to the book in that it introduces the concept of CRM systems as they relate to the business/customer relationship. It also takes a look at how the role of CRM systems has gone away from being merely an issue with IT:
Most importantly, CRM systems elevated information systems from a mere enabler of the business strategy of an organization to a significant part of the business strategy itself. Thus, CRM Systems brought to an end the subsidiary and support role that IT had played throughout the last few decades. But in turn, the very nature of IS has also undergone a complete transformation. Implementing a CRM System within an enterprise is no longer a problem of technology; it is a business problem. CRM Systems have been the harbingers of a paradigm shift in the role of the IS/IT function within an enterprise. This book was motivated by the need to address these fundamental changes in the very nature of IS/IT activity within an enterprise.
Chapter 2 helps the enterprise present a case for adopting the SAP CRM platform by spelling out how such a system can bring business groups together to collaborate with the goal of providing great customer service and responsiveness. With SAP CRM, many users are brought into the fray from the beginning of the implementation, thus giving them more of a sense of ownership and allowing them to become “advocates and facilitators” for the rest of the company.
The chapter also provides sections detailing the pieces and parts of the CRM system and its tools. It touches on electronic CRM uses to allow information to be passed along through the Internet. Kale also talks about customer data, data warehousing and data mining and explains how to use the information gathered to create actionable information for the business, such as sales patterns, product performance and profitability data.
Kale packs a large amount of information into these chapters, which is good for both business and IT managers. He gives both sides the explanations they need to get the CRM implementation off and running. And he provides the knowledge they will need to prepare the business as a whole to welcome a new way of doing business—as a “Customer-Triggered Company.”
Kim Mays has been editing and writing about IT since 1999. She currently tackles the topics of small to midsize business technology and introducing new tools for IT. Follow Kim on Google+ or Twitter.
