What is eCRM?

Consider the following progression for a moment, and let's see where eCRM can lead: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. eCRM provides Access Access creates Information Information enables Measurement Measurement is an imperative for Process Improvement Process Improvement leads to Growth in Revenues & Profit

Therefore, eCRM, well implemented, leads to Growth in Revenues & Profits, a bold assertion? This paper offers a definition of eCRM and explains why this progression is a valid.

Everywhere you look these days you see everybody.com and e-everything. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has been undergoing evolution towards the Web for some years but only relatively recently have we seen the term eCRM.

So what is eCRM? Is it old CRM with some Internet access bolted on? Or is it more fundamental than that? To properly understand eCRM it is useful to look at the evolution of CRM and to review its original objectives.

As can be seen in Figure 1, CRM evolved out of the SFA (Sales Force Automation) systems from the early 90s. Prior to this, companies were not treating Sales & Marketing as priorities for IT investment. Areas such as Accounting, Office Automation and ERP were the moneyspinners and it was difficult to find a seriously funded project for Sales & Marketing system. Today it is very different, CRM is considered as very important in most organisations and for many it has become a major element of their ongoing IT investment.

Of course, investment in any IT system has to ultimately contribute to increasing profitability. There is a close correlation between growth in revenues & profits and the benefits gained from well-implemented CRM, these benefits are: Retaining existing customers Selling more to existing customers Finding and winning new customers

Figure 1 - CRM Evolution

CRM Evolution
Cost Reduction Strategy Growth Strategy

BPR

ERP

SFA

CRM

eCRM

Business Led

IT Led

Marketing Led

1980s

1990s

2000s

CRM is now well understood as todays technology solution to improving these 3 areas of business by: Increasing efficiency Improving marketing and sales decision making Enabling process measurement leading to process improvement

Over the past 10 or so years CRM has evolved out of ostensibly separate sales automation, marketing databases, customer service systems into an integrated system serving all front office/customer facing functions across the enterprise (see Figure 2).

Figure 3 - Enterprise CRM

Supporting the Front Office Many organisations today see CRM as the accepted tool to support these disciplines. Just as an organisation would not consider running their finances without an accounting system, many now would not consider running sales marketing and customer service without a CRM system.

For example in marketing, CRM enables you to know your customers better, understand their value (LTV) and use the information to make better marketing, sales and service decisions. Trying to make marketing decisions today without a system is a bit like navigating at sea using the stars. Internal to the organisation managers can monitor activity, measure performance and improve processes to reduce waste and increase effectiveness. Todays enterprise CRM system will look similar to Figure 3.

Prospects and customers will communicate with the enterprise via a mix of channels, which may vary depending upon where they are in the buying cycle. For example, when responding to direct marketing, contact may be by bingo-card or telephone. When making a purchase decision it may be field sales or a telephone-ordering centre. Post-sales contact may be via a support help-desk. All front-office functions (customer touch points) will share a central CRM database. Integration between the CRM database and the so-called back-office systems e.g. accounts, manufacturing, distribution, ERP etc may be real time or batch interface depending upon need.

The benefits of multiple contact channels are obvious customers have choice - they will use whichever contact channel in most convenient to them. The information captured during all customer contact and transactions is held on a database in a structure and easily accessible

way. Whats more, it can be made available to anyone in the organisation. Core data need only be keyed in once front office and back office systems share the same core records, although each will have additional information specific to their processes.

Conventional CRM What is being described here is what we will call conventional CRM. In conventional CRM the prospect or customer contact will be with a member of your internal staff. Staff will access a central relational (SQL) database sitting on a LAN using specially configured CRM applications on PCs running Windows. Users may be office based, or field based. Field people may have laptops typically using dial-up or email remote database synchronisation. There is however a major limitation in the conventional system one of limited access. Lets look at this issue specifically.

When embarking on any project there are always budget constraints. As with any investment, CRM systems should be deployed to meet priority items first. For example, a typical roll out may be managed in phases. Phase 1 may include most of the sales team plus a bit of marketing; phase 2 may bring on board the rest of marketing and customer service; phase 3 may include remote field sales users who were not part of phase 1, plus an interface to accounts; phase 4. I'm sure you get the picture.

Key issues dictate the rollout A number of issues of course will dictate the rate of a rollout and who is or is not included. For example, a key issue is change-management, i.e. not wanting to do too much, to too many, too quickly.

Another common issue of course is cost. How are we going to afford the new kit and the licences for all these extra users, particularly those who dont need to use it everyday, the occasional users - it would be nice to have them included.

What about our business partners? We would like to include our external telemarketing company it would be great if we could send them list to call and have them enter results and set follow-up actions for our sales team, using the same CRM system.

What about the reseller channel; the dealers why cant they use the same system? We could really keep track of all those leads we send them and get feedback without the continual chasing.

Lets not forget our customers we could give them partial access to the CRM system they could look up product details, request information, log support calls, check delivery progress etc. This would be more convenient for them and lower cost for us.

After all, the idea of tracking every contact and transaction with prospects and customers was the original idea behind Database Marketing - the pre-cursor to, and philosophy behind CRM. Unfortunately due to limited access by the wider population this level of contract tracking could never be achieved until now Enter eCRM.

What eCRMs all about Put simply, eCRM means CRM-database access via the Web. It means Intranet access for internal users, extranet access for business partners and customers and of course, Internet access for the market at large.

As well as this wider accessibility, eCRM enables new marketing opportunities. Web marketing, Web self service, automated response to email requests, remote data warehouse access, integrated marketing channels, etc lets look at some of the advantages For example, the Web offers an additional marketing channel. For marketers the Web is quite different to other channels in an important way everything can be captured and tracked, because by definition every request, response, contact, transaction is carried out on the system potentially nothing is lost.

Another important difference is that Web marketing can be focused more on the needs of the buyer. You can build a Web environment based on the way the customers prefer to do business indeed if you dont they will pass you by! A further example is the ability to offer self-service. Prospects and customers can access product details, prices, delivery, they can place an order; they can book onto a seminar or training course. They can request information, access a bulletin board, log a support call, access a self-support database, and check progress of an action previously logged.

Plan to do eCRM right The Web is offering the customer an additional way of contacting the enterprise and doing business. Customers will choose which contact channel is most effective for them - eCRM means greater efficiency, you dont waste their time and they dont waste yours. But, and its a big but, the system is capturing far more information about the customer than ever before.

Do it right and you can become the easiest company to do business with which brings us back to the original objectives of CRM - customer acquisition, customer retention, customer development.

From a marketing-measurement point of view, all this is very exciting indeed. Consider some of the leading Database Marketing literature of the late 1980s (e.g. Rapp and Collins; Shaw and Stone; Moriarty and Schwartz). Their premise was that marketing Campaign Management was all about capturing every point of dialogue with the market, prospects and customers to enable accurate measurement of marketing effectiveness and to use this to plan future campaigns and events, continuously improving their effectiveness doing more of what worked and avoiding what didnt.

This vision has never really been realised because much of the information in more traditional direct marketing campaigns is lost along the process.

Studying a campaign for guidance Contrast the following extract from a Web campaign with a traditional direct mail event.

First, we advertise our Web site through focused media and direct mail. Every web-hit is captured and is attributed to the advertising event.

Multiple choices are offered to the respondent e.g. request information; book onto an event; self qualify; contact a salesman; purchase product etc all is captured and tracked by the database. More than that we can respond from the system and automatically acknowledge the response, we can fulfil very rapidly most probably directly from the system.

We can route the enquiry to where ever and who ever is best to deal with it based on self qualification data captured at each subsequent stage down the process each player in enterprise will have access to the complete picture so far. We have captured everything; therefore we can measure the process. eCRM is limited only by the creativity of the marketer.

Do we move to eCRM now?

You may be asking yourself at this point Should I be replacing my current conventional CRM system with eCRM? or if you are considering CRM for the first time, you may be thinking, Should I not bother with CRM but jump straight to eCRM? Wait! Lets look at the pros and cons of both before answering these questions. Putting the access issue to one side for a moment, conventional CRM systems offer very powerful capability particularly to your intensive users. These people, who are largely officebased, will need the power of Windows and direct database access on the LAN Browser access would not be the environment of choice for these users. As an existing CRM user, your company will have invested in a client server infrastructure there is no business reason to re-equip and re-train these people.

If you are a first time CRM purchaser you need to tread carefully when considering the socalled new Web-architected products these are in their infancy and many of the new entrant companies have little core competence in CRM.

You may be shown an attractive front-end but whats behind it? Is there a well-developed CRM database structure? Is the entire CRM process functionality integrated end to end? What if you want to change data-structure, screens, navigation and user-processes to match your business? With most of these Web-architected products you probably wont be able to without getting into serious customisation!

Which approach to adopt? A total Web solution may not be the best solution for many organisations, the optimum solution is likely to be a mix of conventional and Web capability - the best of both worlds. The most effective approach to Customer Management relies on more than one technology.

Look for pedigree Leading CRM solutions such as CRMsoft from Chapelfield Systems offer both Client-Server CRM and Web-CRM integrated in a single system. CRMsoft system has evolved from over 12 years of CRM pedigree. The system is steeped in sales, marketing and customer service functionality. Indeed, over 1000 standard business processes are available and this library expands continuously. The system offers one of the most powerful CRM functionality sets on the market today as well as ultimate configurability the system is so open, an authorised-user can change the data structure, screens and processes without touching the source-code. This is all very well for a conventional CRM system, but what about eCRM?

Figure 4 - CRMsoft Architecture

Chapelfield Systems has developed a Web-publisher, which can deploy all existing clientserver configurations to run in Web pages accessible by any Web Browser. There is no special Web development needed; this means the use of common processes between all user communities whether they are Windows Client-Server users or Web-browser users. Security and access-rights for different user communities is controlled by a sophisticated rightsmanagement system. CSL calls the approach configure once deploy anywhere.

Figure 4 describes the integrated CRMsoft client-server and eCRM architecture.

Conclusion In conclusion, eCRM takes conventional CRM to new heights. Combining the technologies of conventional and Web CRM opens Customer Relationship Management to all participants in the process, inside and outside the enterprise. Users can access the CRM system via PCs or Laptops using Windows or via the Web using a Browser. As we move towards WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) devices, cost-effective access will increase still further. eCRM takes us one step further towards harnessing the true database marketing philosophy