|
|
|||||
|
|||||
| Path: Main Street > Resources/Library > Research Articles > Feature Article |
New developments in customer relationship managementBy Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of July 11, 2003.Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, refers to the business processes of connecting with customers or, in the case of nonprofits, donors. CRM is an essential part of fundraising for any organization that wants to develop ongoing relationships with individual donors, but it's usually expensive and difficult to implement.
Typically, nonprofits use specialized fundraising software like Raiser's Edge, eTapestry, ebase, Convio, Donor Perfect or Exceed! to manage donor relationships. These programs include management of contacts, donations, pledges, volunteers, members, events and email campaigns. Some nonprofits customize contact managers like Maximizer, ACT or Goldmine, all of which are trying to bridge the gap into full-fledged CRM. And small to medium sized for-profit businesses ('medium size' is defined by Gartner as between $50 million and $500 million in revenue, by the way; Microsoft defines it as between 25 and 500 employees) are using mid-range packages like Saleslogix, Pivotal and Onyx. For a comparison see a recent review by Gartner. I'm not going to talk about any of those products. Instead, I'm going to talk about new developments in data integration that will change the way CRM is going to work in the future.
There are two good examples of the way things are going; salesforce.com and Microsoft CRM. The first, salesforce.com, is an online hosted service that was one of the most promising Application Service Providers in the days before the dotcom crash. (Its competitors include UpShot, NetLedger and Salesnet). It survived, and it's getting a lot of industry press these days because it's not only profitable, it is offering the capacity to link data seamlessly with a multitude of other applications, including Microsoft Outlook, corporate databases, and fascinating performance management 'scorecards' like Business Objects and various web metrics. It does this through a new set of capabilities that enable customers to connect salesforce.com to their other information systems, both internal and external. At the same time, it enables tiny organizations, or those who are just starting out in this field, to take advantage of a sophisticated program at a low initial cost. The 'team edition' costs under $25 CDN/user/month for up to 5 users and allows a fundraising team to share all of their customer information. I haven't used the software myself, so can't recommend it, but it sure looks interesting. It offers the ability to start small and to build an unlimited amount of complexity without switching providers and without managing a lot of complicated servers and software.
The other big news in the CRM world is Microsoft's entry into the sector. Microsoft CRM is the first application that really uses their 'web service' model. It is tightly integrated with Outlook and other Microsoft programs, and offers the kind of functionality that used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's typical of Microsoft - it tends to transform a marketplace when it gets serious about taking over.
The cost of Microsoft CRM starts at about $395 to $1,295 per user (US dollars), plus server costs of a couple of thousand dollars. It is not designed as an online hosted service, though it can be bought that way through Surebridge.
Web services are hard to explain. According to Microsoft, web services “are the key enabling technology for a new model of distributed applications. Because they rely on open, Internet standards, XML Web services:
- Allow communication between programs written in different languages and operating on different platforms.
- Provide an efficient, flexible way to expose legacy applications and enterprise systems to desktop clients while minimizing point-to-point integration.
- Enable companies using the Internet to more easily connect to and use data published by partners or third parties.
CRM is a natural place to offer web services because it's so vital to integrate customer information with data from other sources. With web services (to use a trivial example), you could even analyse the effects of, say, rainfall patterns pulled from an online weather site on registrations for a special event. Information from a huge variety of sources can be gathered and combined in ways that would be impossible or extremely expensive before now.
More important, the use of web services or similar approaches, like salesforce.com's integration software, enables organizations to buy modules from various providers that meet their needs rather than being stuck with a big integrated package (like Raiser's Edge) or programming their own solution from scratch. Nonprofits needn't be restricted to the limited group of fundraising packages focused on their sector. Salesforce.com could be used to manage direct donor relationships, combined with specialized tools like Artez Interactive's 'Event Relationship Management' and 'Workplace Giving' modules. The CRM field is developing so quickly that software serving only the nonprofit niche can rapidly become obsolete unless it's highly focused.
Other CRM software will soon be providing the same kind of abilities to link with other information systems or they will likely not survive, so don't despair if your current software doesn't do this. Just wait for the next upgrade.
And remember, any software implementation will cost more than you think and not give you what you want unless you're clear about how you plan to collect and use the information. A lot of money has been thrown away on expensive, unwieldy and unhelpful CRM systems because the organization built the system before figuring out exactly how the data were going to drive performance. Until you've gone through a good planning process, it might be a good idea to play with a low-cost program like salesforce.com to see what it can do. But don't underestimate the training and implementation time involved in setting up a solid CRM that fits in your own organization.
**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.netRead my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
|
|||
