By William Band
Since the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle in 2004, the PeopleSoft CRM solution seemed to go underground. Relatively little has been heard about the product since that time. However, Oracle has been continuing to invest. PeopleSoft CRM 9.0, a major step forward, was released in August 2006, and the company will soon announce PeopleSoft CRM 9.1.
My take on Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM in the past has been that the product line has a significant base of loyal customers who value the usability and benefits of integration to PeopleSoft's HR and ERP suites. It offered a broad range of functionality across all the major components of CRM, with particular strengths in sales, customer service, and analytics. It had less robust, but sound, capability for marketing, field service, eCommerce, and customer data management.
Although, the solution does not offer a SaaS deployment option, it provided unique support for specific industries such as the public sector, particularly education. It also provided strong support for the financial services, utilities and telecommunications sectors. All-in-all, PeopleSoft CRM was well-suited for existing PeopleSoft customers who need a broad-based CRM platform to build on.
The release of 9.1 demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to deliver an up-to-date solution for its steadfast PeopleSoft customer base. And, it will to capitalize on the industry sectors for which the solution is particularly well-tuned. The most notable improvements include features to improve user effectiveness such as a “Web 2.0” user experience, new collaboration tools, and reduced clicks and page transfers. The product has enhanced functionality in the marketing and customer service areas. And, it offers added additional capabilities that deepen already strong support for the Higher Education and Telecommunications sectors.
Mindful, of the growing popularly of SaaS CRM solution, the PeopleSoft 9.1 release also targets reducing the cost-of-ownership. For example, it features greater ease of application configuration than past releases. And, it has been tuned to improve system performance, and offers greater interoperability with expanded web services.
In an interesting twist for a CRM product, Oracle is taking advantage of its strong presence in the HR community and will offer “CRM-like” capabilities for this audience. PeopleSoft CRM delivers two products targeted at the Human Resources community: HelpDesk for Human Resources for workforce service delivery and the new Workforce Communications. HelpDesk for Human Resources was introduced in 2004 with integration to PeopleSoft HR. Workforce Communications was introduced earlier this year. And in 9.1, both of these products will provide delivered integration to eBusiness Suite HR release 12.1.
By William Band
A hot topic of debate among customer management thought-leaders right now is the business value of “Social CRM.” My clients want to know how much investment they should make in social computing technologies like: blogs, wikis, forums, customer feedback tools, and customer community platforms. And, they want to know whether and how these new capabilities should be, and can be, integrated with their transactional CRM systems.
In my opinion, there is a lot of hype right now with respect to the business value of the social media and how to leverage this phenomenon to more deeply engage with customers. My own recent survey of 286 companies shows that only 21% currently have established customer communities at present. But, I must admit that the same data also shows that an additional 16% are piloting customer communities, and 26% are interested in implementing them. And, recent research by Forrester’s Natalie Petouhoff on the application of social media to customer service provides evidence of a high ROI.
My colleague, Alex Cullen, just published a report which places this debate in a broader context. The report“The Top 15 Technology Trends That EA Should Watch”, pinpoints that one of the most important technology themes to pay attention to is “social computing in and around the enterprise.” Specifically, he forecasts that customer community platforms will increasingly become integrated with traditional “CRM” applications. This is supported by recent announcements by salesforce.com and SAP CRM with regard to integration with Twitter to enable the monitoring of customer sentiment, and the acquisition of HiveLive, an online community platform, by RightNow. These are examples of early efforts to integrate social computing capabilities with transactional CRM applications in order to extend customer service problem resolution processes into new social media channels.
Businesses are building or connecting with customer communities to gain better insights into customer behaviors and monitor reactions to business actions. Organizations can use customer communities to support market research and product development, accelerate the distribution of marketing messages, provide deeper insights about individuals and accounts for the salesforce, and promote customer self-service to drive down support costs.
Over the next three years I expect a shift from standalone customer communities to communities integrated with enterprise internal systems such as CRM as the quest continues to achieve the holy grail of a “360 degree view” of buyers.
By William Band
Despite the current economic downturn, the need for organizations to create differentiation through unique customer experiences, strive for deeper insight into customer needs and behaviors, and serve customers cost-effectively has not disappeared. The need for “CRM” is not going away.
However, when I surveyed 133 organizations, using at one least of 24 different CRM technology solutions, I found that the risk of a spectacular project failure is still high. These companies reported over 200 problems, comprised of 27 risk areas in four categories. Thirty-three percent of the problems were related to technology; 27% spotlighted inadequate business processes; 22% were related to “people” challenges; and 18% comprised CRM strategy and deployment issues
Consider these statements as they portray your organization. A “Yes” or “No” answer will spotlight the hazards before they sink your program.
Technology
1. “The CRM solution we have chosen is mature and well-proven in use at other organizations with requirements similar to our company."
2. “The CRM solution we have chosen is flexible and can be easily adapted to meet unanticipated requirements in the future.”
3. “The CRM solution we have chosen does not have any major functionality deficiency gaps relative to our requirements."
4. “We have clearly defined how the data required to support our CRM solution will be defined, transferred, maintained, and governed.”
5. ‘We have determined that the CRM solution we have chosen can meet our specific system performance requirements.”
6. “Our business and IT resources have sound understanding of the CRM solution we intend to implement."
7. “We have a sufficient number of technically competent internal resources available to implement our CRM solution.”
8. “We have done due diligence to confirm that the vendor resources to be assigned to our CRM project have sound technical skills with respect to their company's solution.”
9. “The CRM solution we have chosen uses the most up-to-date role-based UI design principles so that it can be easily adapted to a range of user needs in our organization.”
Business Processes
10. “We have undertaken to define and document the business processes we expect our CRM solution to support.”
11. “The vendor solution we have chosen is flexible enough so that the tool can be easily mapped our business processes.”
12. “The CRM solution we have chosen can with little effort be sufficiently customized to meet our requirements.”
13. “The CRM solution we have chosen is compatible with the technical architecture environment and future strategy of our organization.”
14. “The CRM solution we have chosen has well-proven capabilities to integrate with specific important applications and databases within our organization.
People
15. To be successful, the new business processes and CRM solution we intend to introduce will require little change in the culture of our organization.”
16. “We have a well-defined program to support the changes to the new ways of working in our company including visible leadership and communications from top management.”
17. “The CRM initiative will require little change to the business processes used by frontline employees.”
18. “We understand the challenges of gaining acceptance for the use of CRM solutions and have specific plans in place to mitigate these challenges.”
19. “We are investing sufficient resources to provide adequate training and education for users to support their adoption of our CRM solution.”
20. “We have complete CRM solution documentation and will provide sufficient ongoing help for users to support their adoption of our CRM solution.”
Strategy
21. “We have achieved clear and documented agreement between business and IT leaders about the project objectives for our CRM initiative.”
22. “We have defined and documented the business requirements for our CRM initiative.”
23. “We have defined a CRM deployment methodology based on best practices.”
24. “We have a sufficient number of business and IT resources available for successful completion of our CRM initiative.”
25. “Our schedule for implementation is realistic in light of the experiences of other organizations similar to our company.”
26. “We have put in place a sound cost management governance structure and tracking system.”
27. “We have negotiated a transparent contract with our vendor that clearly defines scope, cost parameters, and service levels.”
