With so many Customer Relationship Management vendors making similar promises -- and with some even offering solutions that are on the bleeding edge -- companies may have a difficult time discerning which provider to ink a deal with.
How do you choose the best CRM solution for your company? And, taking it a step further, how do you implement that solution in the most effective, efficient way possible? Those are the types of questions Green Beacon Solutions helps its clients answer. Green Beacon recently offered some CRM selection and implementation best practices on the Microsoft Dynamics blog that are worth review.
Among the best practices are: get upper-management sponsorship, stakeholder participation, pick your CRM team wisely, determine success metrics, define business objectives, customer identification, customer understanding, customer-strategy integration , data and map requirements and standardized data, create customer engagement programs, collect data, monitor and adjust the customer experience, evaluation and purchase, and communicate.
Articulate the Customer Experience
Let's dive into the lesser-explored best practices, such as customer differentiation, customer understanding, and customer experience goal definition. Green Beacon Solutions suggests further identifying your customers by defining segments -- your high-value and high-potential customers: "Know who you want to serve. Understand what that customer wants? Prioritize. What is the customer worth and what is their potential worth to the company?"
On the customer understanding front, Green Beacon says it's a matter of understanding what they want and how they want it from you. Then there's the all-important customer experience goal definition.
"You and your company are the users, but the solution is about your customer. Articulate the customer experience," Green Beacon suggests. "How should their experience feel? Identify important business interactions, e.g. high volume or high cost. Identify interactions that are important to the customer -- high involvement and high perceived importance."
Consider Customer Cycles
What about customer strategy integration? Green Beacon argues that interactive marketing is a fragmented discipline in which marketers work with many different vendors to develop and execute marketing programs. It's up to each individual company, then, to recognize that disparate databases of customer information prevent companies from gaining a holistic view of the customer throughout the organization.
viernes, 14 de octubre de 2011
Boston buzzes over start-ups at freebie-heavy WebInno
Boston buzzes over start-ups at freebie-heavy WebInno
Nothing gets people excited about technology start-ups like freebies, and there were plenty for the taking at Tuesday nights Web Innovators Group event in Cambridge, Mass. Though having learned lessons from start-ups that have crashed and burned in recent years from perhaps an excess of generosity without a good way to pay for it, this event that packed in hundreds of entrepreneurs and their followers wasnt without a good dose of common sense about dollars and cents as well.
The 31st WebInno event, which is the brainchild of NextView Ventures David Beisel, kicked off with 100 free beers courtesy of one sponsor and extended into a nearby after-party featuring an open bar and DJs.
In between, Beisel encouraged attendees to give their time to an outfit called BUILD that helps youths to learn business smarts, one start-up CEO tempted attendees with a chance to win New England Patriots vs. Indianapolis Colts tickets (which depending upon how soon Peyton Manning returns, may or may not be extremely valuable), another offered 25GB of free cloud storage for life and another pledged to give a finders fee of two tickets to the next Boston sports championship event (unclear what would happen if it takes, oh, 86 years for it to happen to the whole group of teams).
CHEAPSKATE ALERT: $1 will get you in on latest social network start-up
Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware (Email for salespeople) and he of the sports championship ticket offer, also tried to woo WebInno attendees with a free 1-year subscription to his company's offering.
But the start-ups showing off their stuff during brief presentations at WebInno also were pressed by Beisel and the audience on how they plan to make money.
Seth Lieberman, CEO of Pangea Media, demoed his companys SnapApp platform designed to help marketers and publishers use social media and their websites to spread the word about their brands and content via quizzes, polls and contests (I mean sophisticated and powerful Web apps that can run anywhere without help from tech resources) and then acquire customers as a result. He touted Martha Stewart, Cisco and others as customers, and when asked about how the company makes money, he said it charges $49 to $500 for its self-service offerings and provides enterprise licenses for those who get hooked on it.
WEBINNO ARCHIVES: Tracking Twitter, hanging with Michael Jackson and eluding Google's radar
MORE FREEBIES: 39 free security tools
Roy Rodenstein of SocMetrics, which won the Audience Choice Award at the end of the night in a smartphone-based voting contest, described his outfits plan to help companies promote themselves by hooking up with people perhaps even more influential than yours truly on social media channels such as Google+ and Twitter.
The offering is based on a big database and proprietary algorithms that index publicly available information, and boasts a slick interface that lets you slice and dice a taxonomy of influencers in categories ranging from Lifestyle to Sports, such as drinking (I did read that correctly, didn't I?). Rodenstein, who knows a little bit about making money based on the sale of his previous start-up Going.com to AOL in 2009, says SocMetrics will make its killing by offering subscriptions to its service, now in private beta. SocMetrics is already helping out a couple dozen agencies, he says.
Nothing gets people excited about technology start-ups like freebies, and there were plenty for the taking at Tuesday nights Web Innovators Group event in Cambridge, Mass. Though having learned lessons from start-ups that have crashed and burned in recent years from perhaps an excess of generosity without a good way to pay for it, this event that packed in hundreds of entrepreneurs and their followers wasnt without a good dose of common sense about dollars and cents as well.
The 31st WebInno event, which is the brainchild of NextView Ventures David Beisel, kicked off with 100 free beers courtesy of one sponsor and extended into a nearby after-party featuring an open bar and DJs.
In between, Beisel encouraged attendees to give their time to an outfit called BUILD that helps youths to learn business smarts, one start-up CEO tempted attendees with a chance to win New England Patriots vs. Indianapolis Colts tickets (which depending upon how soon Peyton Manning returns, may or may not be extremely valuable), another offered 25GB of free cloud storage for life and another pledged to give a finders fee of two tickets to the next Boston sports championship event (unclear what would happen if it takes, oh, 86 years for it to happen to the whole group of teams).
CHEAPSKATE ALERT: $1 will get you in on latest social network start-up
Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware (Email for salespeople) and he of the sports championship ticket offer, also tried to woo WebInno attendees with a free 1-year subscription to his company's offering.
But the start-ups showing off their stuff during brief presentations at WebInno also were pressed by Beisel and the audience on how they plan to make money.
Seth Lieberman, CEO of Pangea Media, demoed his companys SnapApp platform designed to help marketers and publishers use social media and their websites to spread the word about their brands and content via quizzes, polls and contests (I mean sophisticated and powerful Web apps that can run anywhere without help from tech resources) and then acquire customers as a result. He touted Martha Stewart, Cisco and others as customers, and when asked about how the company makes money, he said it charges $49 to $500 for its self-service offerings and provides enterprise licenses for those who get hooked on it.
WEBINNO ARCHIVES: Tracking Twitter, hanging with Michael Jackson and eluding Google's radar
MORE FREEBIES: 39 free security tools
Roy Rodenstein of SocMetrics, which won the Audience Choice Award at the end of the night in a smartphone-based voting contest, described his outfits plan to help companies promote themselves by hooking up with people perhaps even more influential than yours truly on social media channels such as Google+ and Twitter.
The offering is based on a big database and proprietary algorithms that index publicly available information, and boasts a slick interface that lets you slice and dice a taxonomy of influencers in categories ranging from Lifestyle to Sports, such as drinking (I did read that correctly, didn't I?). Rodenstein, who knows a little bit about making money based on the sale of his previous start-up Going.com to AOL in 2009, says SocMetrics will make its killing by offering subscriptions to its service, now in private beta. SocMetrics is already helping out a couple dozen agencies, he says.
miércoles, 28 de septiembre de 2011
Intuit and Salesforce Offer Joint Product for Small Businesses
Intuit and Salesforce Offer Joint Product for Small Businesses
Small businesses have a new tool for tying customer relationships into their financial management. Intuit, maker of the ubiquitous QuickBooks used by many small businesses, has teamed up with leading CRM -solutions provider Salesforce to release Salesforce for QuickBooks.
The new product is part of a lineup of recently released new QuickBook-related offerings from Intuit. The new Salesforce for QuickBooks, designed for current QuickBooks owners, is intended to better organize a small business 's operations, by connecting front- and back-office functions and by allowing sales, lead tracking, and accounting information to be seen as interrelated data .
Integrating Salesforce and QuickBooks
The company said that the new product enables "the No. 1 CRM" to be plugged into "the No. 1 small-business accounting software." QuickBooks item pricing and availability, sales histories, and credit limits can be viewed together with Salesforce leads, opportunities and customer details.
For customers who already have QuickBooks and Salesforce products and services, a related offering -- Salesforce Integration for QuickBooks -- enables an integration of data between the two.
Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Financial Management Solutions division, said in a statement that the Salesforce-Quickbooks combined product is intended to provide "a powerful, expanded view of business information that will help users turn leads into customers."
One of the ways the companies intend to help business owners save time is through the ability for data to be entered once, in one place, and then become available across the QuickBooks and Salesforce
Small businesses have a new tool for tying customer relationships into their financial management. Intuit, maker of the ubiquitous QuickBooks used by many small businesses, has teamed up with leading CRM -solutions provider Salesforce to release Salesforce for QuickBooks.
The new product is part of a lineup of recently released new QuickBook-related offerings from Intuit. The new Salesforce for QuickBooks, designed for current QuickBooks owners, is intended to better organize a small business 's operations, by connecting front- and back-office functions and by allowing sales, lead tracking, and accounting information to be seen as interrelated data .
Integrating Salesforce and QuickBooks
The company said that the new product enables "the No. 1 CRM" to be plugged into "the No. 1 small-business accounting software." QuickBooks item pricing and availability, sales histories, and credit limits can be viewed together with Salesforce leads, opportunities and customer details.
For customers who already have QuickBooks and Salesforce products and services, a related offering -- Salesforce Integration for QuickBooks -- enables an integration of data between the two.
Dan Wernikoff, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Financial Management Solutions division, said in a statement that the Salesforce-Quickbooks combined product is intended to provide "a powerful, expanded view of business information that will help users turn leads into customers."
One of the ways the companies intend to help business owners save time is through the ability for data to be entered once, in one place, and then become available across the QuickBooks and Salesforce
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Showcases CRM
Oracle OpenWorld 2011 Showcases CRM
Oracle will once again host an Oracle CRM Pavilion at its annual OpenWorld conference. The Pavilion will highlight what Oracle is calling a "select group" of independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) focused on customer relationship management (CRM) system integration .
Oracle said it is only choosing the cream of the crop for its CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld, which runs Oct. 2-6 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Pavilion will showcase companies that have demonstrated proven customer success, traction with Oracle's sales organization, and synergy with Oracle CRM's product direction.
These companies will be on hand to demonstrate their solutions, discuss integration concepts, and show customers how to leverage Oracle CRM integration capabilities to make the most of their CRM deployments.
Meet the CRM ISVs
Anthony Lye, senior VP of CRM at Oracle, explained that the CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld is a great way for Oracle CRM customers to see what its partner solutions can bring to the table. "Working closely with these partners has led to many customer successes and product innovations that solve very complex requirements."
Oracle works with its partners to collaborate on product integrations that leverage domain expertise to create deep integrations that are ready to meet customer needs.
A few of the vendors that will be on hand at the CRM Pavilion include Buzzient, an enterprise -class social media analytics firm, Dun & Bradstreet, Fellow Consulting, which develops customizable mobile and offline solutions, Clicktools, Augme Technologies, and BigMachines.
Oracle's CRM Pavilion will also host system integrators who have worked with key CRM ISVs to deploy combined solutions, including IBizSoft and Wipro.
Making Social-Media Connections
Zeus Kerravala, vice president at Yankee Group, says the CRM Pavilion is one more proof point that demonstrates how large the ecosystem around CRM has become.
"CRM is not just contact management anymore. Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger part of this," Kerravala said. "CRM has really become, for a lot of companies, the central point of intelligence for customer-management relations."
As OpenWorld gets under way, Kerravala said he will be looking for any new products and services around automation of the various data silos associated with CRM. That's where he sees challenges.
"We have lots of information silos as far as CRM goes. The question is what do you do with that information? How do you mine the intelligence to learn something useful, particularly around social media? There's lots of social-media information," Kerravala said. "The difficulty is understanding what do to with it."
New details may also emerge around Oracle's acquisition of InQuira. Oracle recently announced that it could now provide customers with a complete CRM and knowledge-management offering that empowers integrated self-service support, online customer forums and agent-assisted CRM.
RM is not without its challenges. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it. Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used. Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.
Oracle will once again host an Oracle CRM Pavilion at its annual OpenWorld conference. The Pavilion will highlight what Oracle is calling a "select group" of independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs) focused on customer relationship management (CRM) system integration .
Oracle said it is only choosing the cream of the crop for its CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld, which runs Oct. 2-6 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Pavilion will showcase companies that have demonstrated proven customer success, traction with Oracle's sales organization, and synergy with Oracle CRM's product direction.
These companies will be on hand to demonstrate their solutions, discuss integration concepts, and show customers how to leverage Oracle CRM integration capabilities to make the most of their CRM deployments.
Meet the CRM ISVs
Anthony Lye, senior VP of CRM at Oracle, explained that the CRM Pavilion at OpenWorld is a great way for Oracle CRM customers to see what its partner solutions can bring to the table. "Working closely with these partners has led to many customer successes and product innovations that solve very complex requirements."
Oracle works with its partners to collaborate on product integrations that leverage domain expertise to create deep integrations that are ready to meet customer needs.
A few of the vendors that will be on hand at the CRM Pavilion include Buzzient, an enterprise -class social media analytics firm, Dun & Bradstreet, Fellow Consulting, which develops customizable mobile and offline solutions, Clicktools, Augme Technologies, and BigMachines.
Oracle's CRM Pavilion will also host system integrators who have worked with key CRM ISVs to deploy combined solutions, including IBizSoft and Wipro.
Making Social-Media Connections
Zeus Kerravala, vice president at Yankee Group, says the CRM Pavilion is one more proof point that demonstrates how large the ecosystem around CRM has become.
"CRM is not just contact management anymore. Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger part of this," Kerravala said. "CRM has really become, for a lot of companies, the central point of intelligence for customer-management relations."
As OpenWorld gets under way, Kerravala said he will be looking for any new products and services around automation of the various data silos associated with CRM. That's where he sees challenges.
"We have lots of information silos as far as CRM goes. The question is what do you do with that information? How do you mine the intelligence to learn something useful, particularly around social media? There's lots of social-media information," Kerravala said. "The difficulty is understanding what do to with it."
New details may also emerge around Oracle's acquisition of InQuira. Oracle recently announced that it could now provide customers with a complete CRM and knowledge-management offering that empowers integrated self-service support, online customer forums and agent-assisted CRM.
RM is not without its challenges. For CRM to be truly effective, an organization must convince its staff that change is good and that CRM will benefit them. Then it must analyze its business processes to decide which need to be reengineered and how best to go about it. Next is to decide what kind of customer information is relevant and how it will be used. Finally, a team of carefully selected executives must choose the right technology to automate what it is that needs to be automated. This process, depending upon the size of the company and the breadth of data, can take anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more. And although some firms are using Web-based CRM technologies for only hundreds of dollars per month per user, large companies may spends millions to purchase, install, and customize the technology required to support its CRM initiative.
lunes, 7 de marzo de 2011
OLAP system
The core of any OLAP system is an OLAP cube (also called a 'multidimensional cube' or a hypercube). It consists of numeric facts called measures which are categorized by dimensions. The cube metadata is typically created from a star schema or snowflake schema of tables in a relational database. Measures are derived from the records in the fact table and dimensions are derived from the dimension tables.
Each measure can be thought of as having a set of labels, or meta-data associated with it. A dimension is what describes these labels; it provides information about the measure.
A simple example would be a cube that contains a store's sales as a measure, and Date/Time as a dimension. Each Sale has a Date/Time label that describes more about that sale.
Any number of dimensions can be added to the structure such as Store, Cashier, or Customer by adding a foreign key column to the fact table. This allows an analyst to view the measures along any combination of the dimensions
Each measure can be thought of as having a set of labels, or meta-data associated with it. A dimension is what describes these labels; it provides information about the measure.
A simple example would be a cube that contains a store's sales as a measure, and Date/Time as a dimension. Each Sale has a Date/Time label that describes more about that sale.
Any number of dimensions can be added to the structure such as Store, Cashier, or Customer by adding a foreign key column to the fact table. This allows an analyst to view the measures along any combination of the dimensions
Multidimensional databases
Multidimensional structure is defined as “a variation of the relational model that uses multidimensional structures to organize
data and express the relationships between data”.The structure is broken into cubes and the cubes are able to store and access data
within the confines of each cube. Each cell within a multidimensional structure contains aggregated data related to elements along each of its dimensions.
Even when data is manipulated it is still easy to access as well as be a compact type of database.
The data still remains interrelated. Multidimensional structure is quite popular for analytical databases that use online analytical processing (OLAP) applications (O’Brien & Marakas, 2009). Analytical databases use these databases because of their ability to deliver answers swiftly to complex business queries. Data can be seen from different ways, which gives a broader picture of a problem unlike other models
data and express the relationships between data”.The structure is broken into cubes and the cubes are able to store and access data
within the confines of each cube. Each cell within a multidimensional structure contains aggregated data related to elements along each of its dimensions.
Even when data is manipulated it is still easy to access as well as be a compact type of database.
The data still remains interrelated. Multidimensional structure is quite popular for analytical databases that use online analytical processing (OLAP) applications (O’Brien & Marakas, 2009). Analytical databases use these databases because of their ability to deliver answers swiftly to complex business queries. Data can be seen from different ways, which gives a broader picture of a problem unlike other models
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