Holistic CRM

Here's how two top CRM vendors are trying to help carriers gain a holistic view of subscribers.

You might have a wealth of information about individual subscribers, but it's likely scattered throughout your organization. In other words, one hand has no way of knowing what the other is doing, and that disconnect can lead to exactly what you don't need in this highly competitive market — customer dissatisfaction.

For instance, suppose one of your enterprise customers' employees went into one of your retail outlets and told the sales rep that his company has an account with your company that offers special prices to employees. However, the sales rep knew nothing about the company's agreement and had no way to find out, except to send the potential subscriber back to his company for instructions. The potential subscriber could attribute this unfortunate experience to a flaw in your business.

The same disconnect could occur when a customer transacts with you via the Web, and then later has to repeat the details of the transaction to an unaware CSR.

Siebel Systems (www.siebel.com) and Oracle (www.oracle.com) are responding to the need for cohesive customer data with software intended to help carriers close gaps between customer contact points. Each vendor is taking a different approach.

Going Wireless

During the eight years since Siebel was founded, the company's software has evolved several times. The first incarnation, launched in 1995, was designed with a broad spectrum of industries in mind, according to David Keysor, Siebel director of product marketing. Later, the company designed software specifically for the communications industry. This year, Siebel assembled a team of specialists to focus on functionality for the wireless industry.

“No longer is there just a need for customer service or for sales-force automation or field sales,” Keysor said. “There's a need to start to incorporate the different distribution channels such as retail channels, agent channels and reseller channels into this mix.”

Carriers' modes of communication with customers also have changed. As Keysor put it, the power balance has shifted to customers.

“They're going to determine which channel they're going to work with,” he said. “Today it might be the Web. Tomorrow it might be the call center. Down the road, it might be through a channel partner of yours. Because of that, there needs to be a consistent message.”

Siebel's e-business applications are designed to link customer touch points and, in some cases, carriers and their channel partners. For example, AT&T Wireless (www.attws.com) has licensed Siebel's e-business software for use by its marketing, sales and customer-service personnel.

Taking a different approach, Cingular Wireless (www.cingular.com) teamed with Siebel to offer enterprise customers access to Siebel's mobile-sales, marketing and customer-service applications via Cingular networks and plans to launch these services later this year.

Siebel also markets a dot-com software suite designed to enable customer self-service functions. Customers can view service-request status on a personal home page and receive targeted marketing pitches.

Within the past 18 months, Siebel has added “out-of-the box” credit and fraud-management capabilities, as well as billing and contact-management capabilities.

According to Keysor, the biggest competitors for Siebel's systems are carrier-developed systems, but he said carriers are moving away from homegrown systems.

“The evolution started in many wireless companies years ago, when they started to see a need for customer service or sales-force automation,” he said. “They built it on their own. But after some time, they realized that was not where they should be spending their time.”

Scaleability and integration problems also led carriers to seek packaged solutions.

Keysor said Siebel's e-communications product has 85% of all the functionality carriers need, which gives them the ability to roll out new applications more quickly and access more comprehensive systems.

Siebel relies on input from communications industry leaders, both wired and wireless, as well as strategic partners to determine which functions to build into the software, he said.

“I spend a lot of my time with wireless providers to understand how they're using our product and to see what's working well, areas that we can improve on and (new) areas that we can develop in,” Keysor said.

Broad Strokes

Oracle is using broader brushstrokes to develop CRM products for the telecommunications industry.

“We've been looking at all divisions of a communications corporation from landline for both business-to-business and business-to-consumers, cable, DSL and wireless,” said Juliette Sultan, Oracle CRM products division vice president.

According to Sultan, carriers' top priorities for e-business solutions include a complete view of the customer and the ability to provision automatically, as well as a single database of customer interactions across contact channels.

From the start, Oracle envisioned software that would integrate customer data into one database, which would be shared among software modules used for various business operations, Sultan said. Developing a cohesive data model was the hardest part.

The company wound up developing its own interaction servers and certifying them in its lab. The servers route and queue customer data from various channels into one information pool. Oracle also developed its own middleware, which can be integrated with its business-application software. Therefore, the only piece needed from an outside vendor would be the switch.

“What it means for our customers is a lower cost of ownership,” Sultan said. “Rather than having to deal with multiple middleware vendors, a switch vendor and a CRM vendor, we tell them to pick up a switch, then pick up our interaction server and middleware, as well as our business application.”

Oracle's communications offerings also include packaged marketing software that enables carriers to target B2B or B2C customers for promotions. Again, data from a number of sales channels is blended into a single database.

“We have a service solution that is quite wide in the call-center environment, as well as field service when necessary,” Sultan said.

It includes automatic provisioning and a network-diagnostic application that identifies problems, tracks the repair status and updates subscribers' trouble tickets, once problems have been resolved.

As carriers add interaction channels such as voice over IP and WAP-enabled phones to call centers, software vendors will need to create the ability to link these channels with the rest of the operation. Likewise, as new types of devices become available, vendors will need to enable transparent interactions through the new devices. Both Siebel and Oracle have developed mobile versions of their e-business software. Time and technology will dictate what comes next.

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A Broad View of CRM

A recent Harte-Hanks survey (www.crmfundamentals.com) examined how enterprises define CRM and how they're implementing it. Harte-Hanks, a provider of CRM and related marketing services, conducted the telephone survey of about 300 North American companies in May.

According to the survey findings:

• Sharing customer data across an organization is considered a component of CRM. Seventy percent of the respondents give inside salespeople access to customer data as part of the organizations' CRM solutions.

• Others who benefit from an “enterprise-wide” approach are: customer service and tech support (67%); outside and field sales (59%); marketing communications (51%); accounting and finance (41%); product marketing (41%); and call centers (40%), among other company functions.

• Another recognized component of CRM is gaining a full view of a company's interactions with customers. The research revealed that the top items included in this shared view are: client product purchase history (71%); client sales history (69%); technical service and customer support history (64%); and external contact data culled from outside commercially available sources (54%).

• Twelve percent of the respondents report that between 76% and 100% of corporate users have or will have access to their CRM solution via the Internet; nearly 40% do not provide or are not planning to provide users with Internet access; 12% provide or will provide at least some corporate users with wireless CRM access.

•The top four challenges cited regarding CRM are: integration of different data sources into a single system (46%); training users to effectively use the solution (31%); participation of different departments within the company (27%); and integration with back-office applications (22%).