CRM & Web 2.0

We hear great stories about Web 2.0 every other day – how people can share, be in touch and can in turn help humanity. Great tools, so how do we use that in CRM? Why CRM you ask – this is too good an opportunity to miss, people all around you are discussing your product and service, complaining about your service, expressing interest in business and you certainly treat that as a major channel for CRM. And this is not the only thing about that, but also utilizing the Web 2.0 tools to run business – among sales people, partners etc. After all, CRM is a movement by the people and for the people (there is no “from the people”, we in IT are not considered human enough).

Thoughtfully, people are not far behind in utilizing this opportunity. Vendors – large & small have been having a go at this great integration of Web 2.0 and social networking features in the mainstream enterprise. But first, why move on to Web 2.0?
Traditional CRM has been just an “upload” application for sales reps. There is no immediate visible benefits for them to do what is expected out of them
Sales force could choose not to be entirely honest with the CRM application, just entering loads of information is not everyone’s piece of cake
Structured organization and presentation of data works really well for IT, but is seldom human, but selling is

And what will happen to the end consumers. These are the guys who just don’t want to purchase a product just because marketing is telling them that they will get everything (yes, including the kitchen sink). They want to discuss with like minded people, get an overview of what they are getting into, check how the product fares in the market and the like. They may be doing that through blogs, forums and WIKIs, but good CRM should enable the organization to have a stake in it. A good discussion might prompt sales offers, a flame can be doused through prompt service – CRM using Web 2.0 can be one indispensable tool. Following is a brief look at what a couple of major vendors are doing about Web 2.0 in CRM.

Oracle

Oracle is one serious player in this segment. Oracle Social CRM (Siebel OnDemand in its new avatar), launched March 2008, is going to be a major step towards using Web 2.0 technologies in enterprise IT. The launch included a “blogger call” prior to disclosing information to public. A bird’s eye view of what we can do with it:

• Real time predictive analytics using not only the data available to the enterprise systems but also with external sources, making it one killer sales tool. For example, a CG industry could decide which sector to target a particular territory based on sales history for similar products in that territory, the recent consumer spend trends from a leading analyst and if need be, even the seasonal conditions that promote or discourage a product. This amalgamation of group behaviour combined with sales force knowledge is “social intelligence”. Get the application to adjust to inputs from users and take into account the factors lying out there that influence the buying behaviour
• Generating excitement about using a product often translates into better information being captured and in-turn being utilized in sales and services. A user friendly screen to capture product literature and display it ala FlickR
• Ability to form arbitrary groups like sales force from a particular region who share customers in the same regions etc
• Sticky notes feature to mark any object and have access to present and future information about that object in fingertips. Or if need be, expose it as a gadget in iGoogle or elsewhere
• Get involved in discussions in a centralized environment message centre

What have we covered here? – RSS feeds, WIKIs, forming of interest groups, expose information through widget APIs. The target audience includes large scale enterprises and not only your neighborhood SMB. Take a hard look folks, Oracle applications as a career option is surely working out :) . Though I would say, SaaS is making it more fun for the businesses.

SAP

SAP, the biggest CRM software vendor out there, did some major Web 2.0 enhancements in its SAP CRM 2007. Announced in Dec 2007, it was compared to iGoogle portal in the introductory summit. At this point in time, I am not in a position to say how effective their new interface is or whether CRM 2007 really helped them go past the bad UI issues of the erstwhile CRM applications.

• Easy to use applications with drag & drop functionality for lot of functions, building mashups were some of the key things outlines for the CRM application
• Widgets like weather forecast module and Google search bars

Salesforce

Where there is innovation, can Salesforce be left behind?

• Salesforce widget APIs have created good excitement (and also good business for a number of small players).
• Salesforce allows creation of RSS feeds
• Salesforce SOA gives a “Yahoo! Pipes” like program where businesses can consume services from Amazon, pull information from Google Adwords or MSN Adcenter
• ContentExchange (not CRM in the purist sense!) gives the power to manage content management of unstructured data as well
• Use tags to subscribe to information (termed web 2.0 folksonomy as against taxonomy in traditional applications)
• Plan for interfaces to WIKIs, interface with word processing services on the web like Google Docs, Zoho Docs

RightNow

RightNow incorporates support for Widgets, Videos, Forums and Blogs in its latest customer portal application August '08. Also present are collaboration tools like Chat and co-browsing.

It deserves special mention to the fact that Oracle & Salesforce are not only vendors, but major implementers of Web 2.0 in the way they run businesses. Oracle blogs provide useful information to one and all, while the forums are abuzz with customer problems, view and feedback. Utilising Web 2.0 in CRM is not constrained only to these major players. There are also numerous other players providing Web 2.0 capabilities in their product. For example HeapCRM, one of the smaller but earlier vendors to embrace Web 2.0, where every message in Heap can be subscribed through RSS and widgets provide access to data through iGoogle or in Mac OS & Windows Vista. What is seen here is a clear indication of the next-gen UI and functionalities that make CRM fun and at the same time, more effective.

The Verdict

In summary, there is lot of proliferation of Web 2.0 functionalities going on in CRM, no doubt beneficial to all stakeholders. Web 2.0 in CRM will enable employees and partners input useful information, share information within & external to organization and able to better sell and service customers. Add to it the end users who will better appreciate the “face” of the organization and the sales/service offers from organization by the very timing of it – ah.. next is what?

But hold, there should be a catch – there is always one for all good things in life.

• The biggest one – information security. Security threat not necessarily because of the software, but the very nature of Web 2.0 that encourages sharing of data. With easier profiling, comes the risk of identity thefts. This was already demonstrated to a bunch of salesforce customers targeted for phishing attacks
• The success of this whole model relies upon sharing of data among stake holders. But in reality, sales people may not be so forthcoming with contact & lead data. Although this makes it hard to determine effectiveness, we are still in a better position as compared to traditional CRM
• Management will find it hard to keep track of what is going on with the traditional tools at their disposal. A right mix of structured with unstructured should make things exciting