NETTING IT OUT

Cross-channel CRM is your next step in strengthening your customer relationships. You do business across many channels. Your customers perform the tasks of their Customer Scenarios with you on combinations of all those channels. Those are the channels across which customers touch you and the channels through which your partners work together to serve your customers. The customer experience that you deliver must consistently and transparently cross all of your channels and must cover all the interactions with customers in your marketing, sales, and service business processes. That’s what we mean by cross-channel CRM.

In this report, we present our framework for evaluating cross-channel CRM products. The framework has six top-level evaluation criteria:

* Fundamental elements (customers, products, and channels)
* Functionality
* Architecture
* Product viability
* Company viability

Use this framework and our planned evaluations of cross-channel CRM products against it to shorten the time, reduce the risk, and improve the effectiveness of your CRM implementations.

WHAT IS CROSS-CHANNEL CRM?

It’s 2004. You’re business is a going concern. You’ve likely already implemented business processes and applications for marketing, sales, and service. You’ve recognized that your customers are the source of the value in your business and that strengthening customer relationships is the key to business growth.

Cross-channel CRM is your next step in strengthening those relationships. You do business across many channels--assisted channels, such as your contact center, and self-service channels, such as your Web site. Your customers perform the tasks of their Customer Scenarios(R) with you on combinations of all those channels. They may start their customer service scenario on the Web, go to the contact center when Web information is inadequate, and return to the Web to download your fix to their problem. They expect their context to persist consistently across channels; they expect that you’ll recognize them and be ready to fulfill the next task in their Customer Scenarios wherever and whenever they appear.

In other words, the customer experience that you deliver must consistently and transparently cross all of your channels and must restore, present, and save customer context. That customer experience covers all the interactions with customers in your marketing, sales, and service business processes. Those are the channels across which customers touch you and the channels through which your partners work together to serve your customers. That’s what we mean by cross-channel CRM.

Evaluating Cross-Channel CRM Products

In this report, we offer a framework for evaluating and comparing cross-channel CRM products. Framework-based analysis is our hallmark. Our frameworks give you the tools to make in-depth evaluations and apples-to-apples comparisons of the products and technologies that you’re considering selecting and implementing for your strategic customer initiatives in a manner that can shorten the time that it takes you to select products and that reduces the risks in that selection. We’ve been using this approach for more than 10 years. Our current research includes framework-based analyses of online meeting products, product search products, self-service customer service search products, and customer-centric analytic applications.

THREE GENERATIONS OF CRM EVALUATION FRAMEWORKS

Architecture

This is our third series of reports on CRM architecture. Our first series and our first framework focused on architecture. We evaluated each of several of the leading CRM product suites against a framework of their architecture’s environments, organization, infrastructure, structure, customization, and integration. We felt, and still feel, that understanding architecture would help you differentiate products and help you understand your CRM implementation effort and the integration between your CRM applications and your back-office and supply chain systems.

Channels

Our second series added channel support to the evaluation framework. You told us that you were touching your customers across multiple channels. In order for a CRM product suite to be most useful to you, it had to support multiple channels for each of the business processes (marketing, sales, and customer service) that its applications implemented. By adding channel support to the framework, we could differentiate products even more than with just an architectural evaluation. Understanding channel support adds to your understanding of the time, effort, and expense for CRM implementation. You begin to get an idea of the scope of customization required for the products you’re considering and an idea of what additional applications you’ll need to acquire and integrate to provide a comprehensive customer experience.

Functionality, Customers, Products

Our framework for this third research series on “Cross-channel CRM” adds functionality and customer and product data support to the evaluation framework. Our evaluations on functionality aren’t deep dives into features and functions. Rather, they’re high-level analyses for the minimum functionality needed to provide a decent customer experience in marketing, sales, and service cross-channel. Functionality supports the tasks of your Customer Scenarios. But no CRM product or product suite packages all of the functionality that you need to support all the business processes of your customer experience across all the channels through which it’s delivered. You have to customize your CRM applications, or you have to integrate them to produce a complete, consistent, and coherent customer experience. And that’s where architecture comes in. The purpose of functionality analysis is to help you understand the scope and scale of the time, cost, and effort required to:

* Implement CRM products for the channels across which you touch your customers

* Customize CRM products for the ways that you do business

* Integrate CRM products with those external applications that you must acquire and implement in order to complete the customer experience that you want to provide

Analysis of customer and product data increase your understanding of the implementation, customization, and integration work. Customer and product data support is really another dimension of architecture. We separate these criterion in the framework because they’re so fundamental to CRM. Unless a CRM product or product suite can represent your customers and your products “out of the box,” then that product or product suite may not even be worth your consideration because ...