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The Inside Story: How The Top 18 CRM Solutions Stack Up In 2012

Posted by William Band on July 10, 2012

 

The most frequent question I get every day is: “What is the best CRM technology solution for my company?” I recently teamed with four other Forrester analysts (Kate Leggett, Boris Evelson, Brian Walker, and Stephen Powers) to evaluate 18 leading CRM solutions against more than 400 product feature, platform, and market presence criteria. Here’s a sneak peek at our key findings from two new reports: The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Large Organizations, Q3 2012 and The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Midsized Organizations, Q3 2012.

■        CRM solutions are widely adopted, and buyers plan to increase investment. In fact, 50% of the 556 North America and European large organizations we recently surveyed have implemented a CRM solution (a marketing, sales, or customer service application). An additional 23% have plans to adopt a CRM solution within the next 12 to 24 months.

■        Consolidation alters the vendor landscape. In response to the demand for solutions that support the cross-channel, end-to-end customer journey that defines the quality of the experience an organization delivers, large CRM vendors such and Oracle, SAP, and salesforce.com have acquired direct competitors or have snapped up companies in adjacent spaces to broaden the range of their offerings.

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Navigating The Mobile CRM Landscape

Posted by William Band on June 27, 2012

I continue to field a steady stream of inquiries about “mobile CRM.” There has been an explosion of mobile devices and applications entering enterprises through corporate-approved channels as well as via employees who bring their own devices to the office. Assembling all the components of a mobile CRM solution to meet the precise use cases for specific types of customer-facing workers requires navigating a complex set of decisions, including:

Application types. Applications can be native (thick client), Web or hybrid (native plus Web), or cross-platform (mobile middleware or rich Internet client applications). Today, developers build specialized thick-client applications that are downloaded onto PCs or mobile devices. But the rise of HTML5 will solidify the browser as a viable local host for applications. With HTML5, the browser becomes a more capable thin client, accessing services on a centralized, cloud-based host.

 
CRM applications. All of the leading CRM application vendors focusing on large enterprises support mobile access to their applications, and they are racing to upgrade their capabilities to keep up with the new form factors that mobile workers demand. These vendors and their products include Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle Siebel CRM and Oracle CRM On Demand, salesforce.com, and SAP CRM. CRM suite vendors focused on the midmarket, such as CDC Pivotal CRM, Maximizer Software, Sage SalesLogix, and SugarCRM, also have new mobile solutions offerings.
 
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Nine Best Practices For Avoiding The Pitfalls Of CRM "Cloud" Solutions

Posted by William Band on May 30, 2012

Enterprises of all sizes like the low upfront costs, usability, flexibility, and time-to-value of CRM software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Solutions I see enjoying increasing popularity include salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, and Oracle’s cloud CRM products: Oracle CRM On Demand and RightNow (now called Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service). The Sage CRM products for the medium-size organization market (Sage SalesLogix and Sage CRM) have been also retooled to include “on-demand” options and SugarCRM is also available in variety of on-demand deployment configurations.

There are many advantages to moving your CRM solution to “the cloud.” But follow these best practices to avoid the pitfalls that can trip you up:

  1. Dig deep to understand total costs. Understanding the true cost of a SaaS solution is important. The cost elements are software license fees, internal labor implementation costs, professional services fees, and user training costs. Additional SaaS cost drivers include fees for extra features like mobile and offline access, industry-specific functionality, storage capacity beyond a preset limit, and premium help desk support.
  2. Spotlight the risks. Vet your CRM vendor carefully to make sure it will be around for the long term, and be sure that you have contract provisions that protect your company if the vendor is acquired or goes out of business. Additional risks for SaaS solutions include loss of control, weaker integration, limited virtualization, and more restricted customization capabilities compared with on-premises solutions. Buyers also worry about physical and data security.
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The Eight Questions To Ask Before You Buy A CRM Solution

Posted by William Band on May 22, 2012

During the last five years, the customer relationship management (CRM) solutions market has experienced considerable growth and turmoil. Quickly evolving technologies like multichannel digital customer engagement, real-time decisioning, social computing, business process management (BPM), and mobility are creating new ways for organizations to deliver differentiated customer experiences. There has been a rapid rise in the popularity of solutions deployed through the cloud, and vendors have acquired direct competitors or snapped up companies in adjacent spaces to broaden their customer management offerings. As a result, business and IT leaders are often confused about which solution to choose.

I have just finished Forrester’s Wave™ evaluation of the leading CRM solutions. We evaluated 18 solutions against 411 criteria and will publish our findings in June. While every CRM solution has its strengths and weaknesses, here are the key questions you need to ask to pin down the right solution:

1. Will the solution help us deliver great customer experiences? More organizations are moving beyond empty goals like “becoming customer-obsessed” to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. Look for solutions that will help you to break down organizational silos and support the full customer journey that traces how buyers interact with your organization.

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Marketers: Have You Defined Your Technology Roadmap?

Posted by William Band on March 6, 2012

In a recent report, my colleague Robert Brosnan correctly spotlights that marketers require ever more technology to capture, integrate, analyze, and apply customer data to marketing programs. Indeed, the technology portfolio that marketing leaders must understand and manage is exploding. Marketers typically have a portfolio of technology assets to support marketing planning, marketing asset management, campaign management, segmentation, and predicative modeling. And most marketers work with online marketing tools for email, mobile, social, and web analytics.

Rob recommends that marketers establish an enterprisewide marketing technology office (MTO) to ease and take advantage of technology development. The office, working through a chief marketing technology strategist, sets marketing technology strategy, makes the business case for embedding new technology within marketing programs, and manages technology-related partnerships. The marketing technology strategy should summarize the road map for how you plan to employ the technologies necessary to understand and engage more deeply with your target customers.

Forrester defines the marketing technology road map as:

A plan that matches short-term and long-term marketing goals with specific technology solutions to help meet those goals.

So how do you formulate the marketing technology strategy and road map?

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Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

Posted by William Band on March 1, 2012

My Twitter feed is going wild with #social, #mobile, #CX, and #bigdata hype. But Forrester clients want practical advice for today, in addition to spotting changes on the horizon.

One of the most common questions I get is: “What are the CRM pitfalls I need to watch out for?” I surveyed nearly 150 companies to find out the problems they faced with their CRM initiatives. Here is what you need to pay attention to:

  • Crafting a customer relationship management strategy. Eighteen percent of the problems at the companies I surveyed pertain to CRM strategy. Within the CRM strategy category, specific pitfalls identified include: inadequate deployment methodologies (40%), poorly defined business requirements (25%), and not achieving organizational alignment on objectives (18%).

“Reaching a consensus between IT’s objectives and those of the business unit was a problem.” (Marketing manager, manufacturing company)

“Internal disagreements on how to implement were the cause of our problems.” (Senior director, customer support, media, entertainment, and leisure company)

  • Rearchitecting critical customer-facing processes. CRM processes consist of the work practices associated with major customer-facing business functions within an organization. Twenty-seven percent of the problems reported center on difficulties with business process management. Within the business process category, specific pitfalls to watch out for include: technical/integration difficulties in supporting company processes (48%), poor business process design (31%), and the need to customize solutions to fit unique organizational requirements (21%).
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Transform Business Processes For Breakthrough Customer Experiences

Posted by William Band on January 10, 2012

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-change custom solutions, leading organizations are embracing business process methodologies — supported by process-centric IT platforms. They are striving to drive rapid process change, increased business engagement in IT projects, and achieve dramatic improvements in worker productivity.

In my new report, I define more than 30 best practices that organizations can use to support their transition to process-centric customer CRM. Here are few of them:

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The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends For 2012

Posted by William Band on January 3, 2012

What are the key trends that CRM trends that business and IT professionals need to pay attention to in setting their plans during 2012? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report that spotlights our latest research and recommendations for how to compete in The Age of the Customer will be published in late January.

1. Customer experience management will move beyond aspiration to strategy. More organizations will move beyond empty goals like becoming “customer-obsessed” to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. The strategy must meet three tests: 1) It defines the intended experience; 2) it directs employee activities and decision-making; and 3) it guides funding decisions and project prioritization.

2. Brands will embrace the experience ecosystem. Firms will move to break free from their organizational silos, invest in understanding customer moments of truth through journey-mapping, and embrace the concept of the “customer experience ecosystem” — one that considers the influence of every single employee and external partner on every single customer interaction.

3. Experience management will emerge as a management discipline. There is increasing acceptance of the idea that customer experience management can be thought of as a discipline — a set of sound, repeatable practices such as those are defined in Forrester’s Customer Experience Maturity Framework.

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CRM And BPM Solutions Converge To Domesticate Untamed Customer Processes

Posted by William Band on December 20, 2011

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. I found that these companies are moving from isolated business process management (BPM) and/or front-office customer relationship management (CRM) projects toward broader transformation initiatives across the organization. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

My report on the best practices for process-centric CRM will be published soon. A key finding is the growing convergence of data-centric CRM, BPM, and dynamic case management (DCM) solutions. The right mix of these solutions, of course, depends on the use cases you are designing for. For example:

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Corporate Culture Clash Looms With Oracle’s Acquisition Of RightNow

Posted by William Band on October 24, 2011

  • 323 Recommendations

The acquisition of RightNow by Oracle makes sense for both companies’ CRM solutions strategies. Oracle wants to beef up its overall “cloud” portfolio. This is a strength of RightNow, one of the pioneers of the SaaS deployment model. It also needs a stronger play in the customer service sector — an area that salesforce.com targeted several years ago. This is the core domain strength of RightNow.

RightNow has had good success, posting strong growth over the last several years — but a $250 million software company found itself at an awkward size to compete against giants like Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.

The big risk to this deal is that the corporate cultures of Oracle and RightNow could not be more different. Oracle’s bare-knuckle approach to sales and how it treats customers is the complete opposite of RightNow’s ethos of client centricity and flexibility.

Many clients that have chosen RightNow may not be happy to hear that Oracle is their new software supplier for customer service. And the employees at RightNow are likely to find working for Oracle an unpleasant contrast to Montana-based RightNow’s corporate ethos.

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