Keeping the Customer in Customer Relationship Management CRM

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.

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.

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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.