CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications don’t usually make the infrastructure group’s favorite application list. Along with BI (Business Intelligence), it is the Rodney Dangerfield of software – it never gets any respect. The usual running joke is that CRM really stands for Customers Rarely Matter. That’s a sad indictment for a tool that gets a lot of attention from business leaders.
Know thy customer is the mantra of every business book and stalwart promise of CRM vendors – the ability to acquire, retain and enhance customer relationships. The applications attempt to capture those interactions across multiple communications channels: email, fax/snail-mail, person-to-person, web, and the biggest channel of all, the phone (wired or wireless). A large proportion of CRM fields and reports are dedicated to customer information derived from incoming and outgoing phone calls.
So according to a recent Forrester study, why do less than 5% of US businesses actively track and report on voice communication activity in their CRM applications? Limited and/or inaccurate input from users. Every sales manager would want to know with 100% certainty the details around phone traffic. However, in the typical CRM implementation, users don’t update the phone activity fields either before, during or after a customer call. One pundit boiled down the potential implementation success to three questions:
1.Does it require more than 30 minutes of training for basic usage?
2.Does management believe the user input data is valid?
3.Does the business count customer satisfaction as a top-3 mission?
The promise of UC has been more about converging rather than integrating technologies. Very few manufacturers (either CRM or call control platform) have embraced a packaged integration product for the burgeoning UC market. Of those who do have an offering such as Cisco's Unified CallConnector, the software tends to be free middleware with a nice marketing spin. In other words, good luck on making it work consistently or obtaining support in the real world.
This lack of a prepackaged solution usually meant custom development resources, either in-house or external, for enterprise-size businesses. That puts CRM integration out of the reach of smaller firms that lack the resources to do this.
Fortunately technology markets abhor a vacuum. A couple of firms have seized the CallManager-CRM integration opportunity and begun offering packaged applications.
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