INTRODUCTION

Maximizer Software Inc. provides proven and affordable customer relationship management (CRM) and contact management solutions that help small to medium-sized businesses increase sales, streamline marketing, and improve customer service and support.

Maximizer CRM also provides full-featured CRM functionality solution for large organizations. The functionality includes marketing automation and customer service & support. Maximizer CRM provides multiple access options including desktop, Web and through the latest PDA device .

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES :

Maximiser CRM is:
• Simple and quick to deploy, learn, use and maintain.
• Multiple Access options: web, Windows desktop, and BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile®, and Palm® devices
• Best Value in its class for full-featured CRM.

MODULES
Maximizer is available in three different Editions viz : Group, Professional and Enterprise Editions and offered in the following :
• Contact and account management
• Sales force automation§
• Marketing automation
• Customer service and support
• Web and mobile device access (BlackBerry® or Windows Mobile®
• Microsoft Office® integration§
• Partner relationship management
• Workflow automation
• eCommerce and payment processing
• Microsoft Exchange Integration
• Integration with QuickBooks® Microsoft GP® accounting software

MARKET REVIEW

Maximizer Software is an international organization with business partners and offices in its three regions: Americas, Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA), and Asia Pacific. Maximizer has sold over one million licenses to more than 120,000 customers, ranging in size from entrepreneurs to multinational organizations, include leading companies such as Siemens, Ipsos, Nestlé Clinical, Ericsson, HSBC, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, William Mercer, and Bank of New York.

INTRODUCTION

Epiphany CRM is comprehensive customer relationship management software that integrates marketing, sales, and service. Its built on the industry’s most advanced, service-oriented architecture, based on the Infor Open Architecture, a service oriented architecture platform.

This solution is designed to drive intelligent customer interaction. It provides an ecosystem for intelligent customer interactions at every point with a focus on serving large and mid-size companies.

Epiphany powers deep customer insights and optimizes each relationship from both a income generation and customer retention viewpoint. Epiphany enables global organizations to align touch points, processes and technologies around the most valuable company asset – the customer.

The Epiphany software suite is a family of modular CRM applications designed to assist the largest -consumer-oriented companies like telecommunications, retail financial services and insurance industries.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

The CRM solution offers real-time customer information and decision management. The Key features are:
Marketing: delivers inbound and outbound marketing capabilities that streamline the campaign activity and create real-time customer profiles which can be analyzed to identify high-impact offers at the time of customer interaction.
Sales: provides sales force automation and opportunity management capabilities that facilitate customer conversations by driving intelligence into every customer interaction.•
Service: serves as the basis for personalized contact center operations, giving customer service representatives a unified view of customers

Infor’s Epiphany CRM software system helps companies; •

• Run campaigns that align with your customers’ preferences•
• Tightly integrate marketing across all inbound and outbound channels•
• Increase sales productivity by providing customer insight•
• Manage marketing and sales resources more efficiently•
• Turn contact centers into profit centers

MODULES•
E.piphany Marketing: This includes: Campaign Management, Interaction Advisor, Event-Driven Marketing, E-Marketing, Marketing Management, Insight for Marketing.
• E.piphany Sales: Connected Sales, Lead Management, Mobile Sales, Telesales, Interaction Advisor for Sales, Insight for Sales.
• E.piphany Service: Contact Center, Customer Support, Service Center, Dialogs, E-mail Response, Web Self-Service, Interaction Advisor for Service, Insight for Service.

MARKET REVIEW

Epiphany CRM has the user interface that is not user-friendly and it lacks content management capability. However it has a strong presence in the following industries:
• Aerospace and Defense•
• Automotive OEM•
• Automotive Supplier•
• Chemicals
• Consumer Packaged Goods – Beverage,
• Tobacco•
• Consumer Packaged Goods –
• Food Products•
• Consumer Packaged Goods – House, Health, Beauty Products
• Electronics and Semiconductors•
• Hi-Tech (Computers, Communications, Office)•
• Industrial Manufacturing•
• Industrial/Heavy Equipment and Machinery•
• Medical Devices•
• Miscellaneous Manufacturing•
• Pharmaceuticals

RightNow is one of the few CRM solution providers, who has consistently demonstrated CRM approach and implementation at every opportunity. RightNow pioneered the concept of a Customer Success Indicator (CSI) in order to measure customer utilization and then advance and optimize the customer’s usage and value from their CRM software investment.

RightNow CRM offers full featured CRM solution which uses a smart client architecture that connects and distributes presentation logic, application logic and database logic between browser client and a hosted server. The company’s strengths lie in its customer service application. RightNow offers both hosted delivery and on-premise licensing.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

RightNow CRM offers impressive features:

Customer Service: The product’s ability to manage customer service and self service through such channels as e-mail, live Internet chat, and telephone interactions is competitively strong against any other SaaS CRM solution.
Voice enablement: It offers a suite of voice-enabled CRM products which include Voice Interface to Knowledge Base, Voice Interface to Incident Management, Voice Interface to Locator, Status Applications, Password Reset, Survey, and One Number Routing.
Tools strength: RightNow offers intelligent and uniquely strong work flow tool like Customer Experience Designer, Workspace Designer and Feedback feature.

MODULES •
RightNow Service: RightNow Service offers intelligent multi channel customer service solution with eService capabilities and full contact center functionality. This helps organizations to give their customers an extraordinary experience regardless of contact channel.
• RightNow Sales. The SFA solution seems to be a combination of internal development and the former SalesNet product. RightNow Sales provides a unified view into all customer interactions, whether they are used by sales representatives or by revenue generating service agents.
• RightNow Marketing: Campaign management.: RightNow Marketing allows one to communicate proactively with customers and easily utilize the power of the web and email to enable personalized communications.

MARKET REVIEW

RightNow is currently the third largest SaaS CRM software company (behind Salesforce.com and Oracle On Demand) . It has one of the highest customer retention rates in the CRM industry. However, RightNow interface is described as complex or odd by several sources. The product is divided among multiple browser windows and ‘consoles’ .
Major competitors are: • Salesforce.com, Oracle CRM On Demand, Aplicor

Zoho CRM is the most comprehensive suite of web-based applications for small businesses. Its an online application which works on the concept of SaaS or Software as a Service.

The greatest advantage of using Zoho CRM is “cost reduction”. One need not invest in a complete CRM suite in one go and can use the application to the extent desired with the option to expand and use the full service at a later date.

It is a neat piece of application which is suitable for the first time CRM users, as well as for organizations who would want to deploy complete selection of CRM features. The users can easily experiment and explore the features offered by a CRM

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Zoho CRM is a feature- rich application providing end to end CRM tools. Its Sales force suite provides comprehensive tools for customer engagement.
Zoho is embedded with a high level of role based security features and tools for inventory management. Furthermore, it has an impressive array of reporting and metrics management tools.

Zoho CRM is built for ease of use and can be tailored to suit all requirements. The program can be mastered within a couple of days and does not require specialized training or previous software experience. The rapid deployment of the CRM application is one its main advantages.

Value for money: It’s a great, CRM solution along with a great price, too. Zoho allow up to three users totally free.
No long -term contracts, pay as you go. You are not bound by any long, yearly contracts. You have the freedom of paying monthly, quarterly or yearly.
It’s all hosted. Zoho backs all the IT service and support needed. One need not buy expensive servers, software, backup solutions.
Ease of Customization. Zoho offers customization as per the user’s needs. Also offers drag-and-drop customization which help users to get things done quickly.
It’s not just CRM. When you create a Zoho CRM account, you also get access to the Zoho suite of products – from online storage and network meetings to other business products, such as project management, invoices and more.

MODULES

Zoho CRM offers all the modules and tools that one might need to run sales & marketing operations. It offers modules which are useful in sales management, inventory management, customer support and service, reporting and dash boarding.

It integrates sales with campaigns and helps monitor leads with the help of calendar and reminders. The inventory management system is comprehensive and guides sales force in fulfilling client orders. The reporting module is comprehensive and assists in analyzing trends and monitor key CRM metrics.

• Sales Force Automation
• Lead Management
• Web Forms
• Marketing Automation
• Customer Support
• Inventory Management
• Reports & Dashboards

MARKET REVIEW
Overall Zoho CRM is an impressive application. It has naturally grown in small patches. Zoho CRM is used by thousands of small, medium and smart businesses. Zoho CRM belongs to a staple from which many other equally balanced applications have emerged. This means that one can take advantage of a lot of other related applications like an online office suite which enhances the user experience.

INTRODUCTION

Aplicor innovated intelligent and user friendly CRM and accounting software-as-service (SaaS) solutions for mid market and enterprise organizations. It is hosting CRM solutions since 1999 and ERP/accounting since 2003.

Aplicor focuses on:

• Front-to-back office hosted solutions. Aplicor is one of only two hosted companies that provide complete, front office CRM and back office ERP hosted solutions (the other company is NetSuite).
• Targets mid market and enterprise organizations.
• It provides product advantages embedded in its superior tools suite. The Workflow Designer permits users to create remarkably flexible business process automation routines.

Aplicor offers the most advanced work flow, customization and integration tools and is the only- hosting solution with 100% up time for several years
The company’s CRM application is designed for Mid-market organizations and Divisions or departments of larger organizations.

It offers deployment on subscription purchases that comprise of all IT and support staffing. It save capital investment on outlay for a software license, additional funds required for implementation- consulting services and the hiring of another IT or support resources.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Aplicor offers its CRM and ERP products for Public Sector (Government), Financial Services and Professional Services. The value of Aplicor’s industry solutions over other, CRM business solutions is that Aplicor’s includes complete front office (CRM) and back-office (ERP) integration.

The company has industry specific solutions, the majority of its customers continue to be using parallel CRM and accounting systems.

Its main strengths are:

• The most comprehensive Business Process Automation toolkit for exceptional workforce productivity gains.
• Flexible software configuration to adapt the CRM software system to current and evolving business requirements.
• A graphical Customization Designer to modify each page layout and get the most relevant and easy to use screens.
• Built-in best practices content for suggestive instruction and sales coaching during the sales process.
• A business intelligence (BI) information analysis suite which includes data warehousing, online analytical processing (OLAP) and predictive reporting.
• Focused on serving mid-market and large organizations.
• Strong global CRM system.
• Very strong ease of use and exceptionally high user adoption.
• Provides integrated CRM and ERP/accounting hosted solution.

MODULES
• Sales Force Automation (SFA)•
• Marketing Management•
• Customer Service•
• Project Office•
• Offline Edition•
• Reporting & Analysis•
• Digital Dashboard•
• Outlook/Exchange/Lotus Notes Synchronization•
• Office Integration Suite•
• Workflow Processing•
• Sales Order Entry•
• Form Designer•
• Content Management System

MARKET REVIEW

Analysts, media and users have spoken in concert to identify Aplicor as the most independently awarded CRM software from 2004 through 2006. Aplicor has been twice named the Best Product Development Company in North America by the ABA and three times named the product of the Year by Technology Marketing Corporation (TMCT) and Customer Inter@action Solutions® magazine.

Aplicor and Salesforce.com hold the largest hosting/SaaS customers in the hosting industry. While Salesforce.com has larger customers than Aplicor, Aplicor has a much larger concentration of large customers than Salesforce.com (e.g. Salesforce.com’s average client size is less than 20 while Aplicor’s average client size is over 100).

Aplicor seems to be the most awarded hosted solution in the industry over about the last four years.

Sugar CRM’s solution offers a single application for handling customer interaction across different lines of business, with emphasis on growth in European.
Sugar CRM offers multiple options for deployment consisting of on-demand, on-premise and appliance-based solutions in order to meet customers’ integration, configuration and security requirements.

An enormous amount of Sugar’s success attributes to its relationship with Microsoft in 2006. This created interoperability among Sugar and Microsoft’s Windows Server, operating system, Active Directory and SQL Server database.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Sugar CRM offers three editions designed to help companies in different stages of growth.

• EXPRESS: CRM essentials for up to 10 users•
• PROFESSIONAL: Advanced CRM for small & medium-sized businesses•
• ENTERPRISE: CRM for the most demanding business.

Features offered are:
• Core Sales
• Marketing
• Support and Collaboration
• Dashboard
• Sales Forecasting
• Reporting
• Mobile
• Customer Portal

Sugar CRM Advantages:

Affordability: Excellent CRM solution for organizations with budget constraints.
Open source customization and comprehensive program. It comprises of appropriate- training program, source code, documentation, training programs and a fairly active group that supports the success of open source efforts.

MODULES

• Sugar Sales Management includes lead, account and opportunity management
• Marketing Automation includes campaign management and email marketing
• Customer Support includes case management and incident tracking
• Reporting
• Collaboration
• Platform

MARKET REVIEW

Sugar CRM is placing an emphasis on European growth. Clint Oram, the company’s Co founder, has relocated to Dublin, Ireland to open the company’s first European sales office and assume the role of General Manager of Sugar Europe.

As per the company statistics, its open source product set has been widely adopted across Europe, particularly in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Also, about one-quarter of its commercial customers are located in Europe, and more than 30 percent of Sugar Open Source downloads take place in Europe.

Main Competition comes from:

Commercial competitors: Entellium and Salesforce.com.
Open source competitors: Anteil Open CRM, Camp Ware Cream CRM, Centra View CRM, Com Piere CRM, Dark Horse Centric CRM, Ohio edge CRM, Open-App Sell Win CRM and Open Source CRM Project.

Automating inventory in the CRM life cycle provides a corporation competitive advantage and leads to an array of satisfied customers. It empowers the companies to have a tighter control of stock level and thus cut on inventory cost. The users can see updated inventory levels on the web stores.

This application automates the entire CRM Inventory Management system:

Warehouse Management: This software streamlines the shipping process by organizing the warehouse using bins, to track the location of each item in stock. This enables the shipping and handling employees to locate and process the orders faster. This also streamlines the re-stocking process, by generating a list of goods received. One can manage a single warehouse or multiple and can be organized as per the stakeholder needs.

Cost Management: In order to maximize profits one needs to calculate accurately different cost (material/import), allocate overhead to inventory receipt. Hence this tool empowers the organization to work out the logistics by accurately calculating the landed cost.

Inventory Replenishment: The solution provides intuitive control over inventory replenishment. It ensures that enough stock is in hand to fill anticipated orders, but keeps excess inventory to a minimum. The user gets an ability to manage stock based on the anticipated demand (Lead time, Seasonal-based demand). The users can set up rules to manage refilling by creating and ordering the required items.

Customer and Volume Pricing/Multiple currency: With the assistance of this tool, the users can assign different prices for different types of customers. For example, one can set up different pricing for wholesale, retail or online sales. As per the necessity of the company, the application has a capacity to set up and calculate pricing in different currencies.

Integration: While creating new inventory items, the software enables users to determine the attributes, such as pricing, captions, images and more. The users have a clear visibility into inventory levels along with statistics on the ordered quantity.

Multi Location Inventory Management: This solution empowers users to manage inventory at different locations. It has an ability to select the warehouse which can fulfill the order commitment. The users can also generate inventory report and receive information on the inventory at a particular location.

Invoice Management: With Inventory Management CRM, the users can track outstanding invoices, customize invoice print layout and manage multiple invoice templates for different product lines. The solution automatically generates Total Cost by adding items, cost, and taxes on the invoice. E-invoices can be sent to customers.

Key Benefits of the Inventory CRM Management solution:•

• Streamlines the inventory management system, ensuring faster and accurate deliveries.•
• Great solution to manage and organize warehouses.
• Helps to accommodate volume and special orders.
• Powerful tool for Inventory analysis and profitability calculation.
• Easy to transfer stock.
• Inventory restocking-refilling process gets easy to manage.
• Control over inventory.
• Reduce inventory cost.

ORDER MANAGEMENT CRM

Customer Order Management solutions abridge the complex system of tracking thousands of products across multiple catalogs and systems. It enables cross and up selling opportunities. Consequently, it plays a vital role in decision- making process by providing employees with relevant information about their customers at the appropriate time.

The entire fulfillment process, allows sales representatives to convert estimates into orders with just one click. One can manage orders more cost effectively across the order management chain. Orders can be tracked from inception to completion and with integration with the shipping process; live status on the shipping status can be view by customers and employees. This results a remarkably smooth order fulfillment process, on time deliveries and hence enhances customer experience. Hence, the solution contributes towards increased productivity and improved profitability through efficient order management process.

The functionality support the critical order management processes:

Order Entry Process: This interface allows the user to enter orders efficiently, with few key strokes. Once the user enters the order and gets approved, it automatically goes to the warehouse and on fulfillment becomes an item to be billed. The solution accurately captures the customer orders across multiple channels; orchestrate the orders for seamless order fulfillment execution. It communicates order status information to customers throughout the order life cycle. It aids in efficient shipment planning and validation.

Order Pricing: The pricing interface applies right amount, terms and deduction to every order, including orders based on Sales Agreements.

Default Management: Order Management lets one specify item order ability rules to control “who can order what”. The functionality of the solution provides the ability to approve an order during the order capture process. It ensures entry of all necessary and accurate information in order to fulfill the order efficiently. It populates order details like payment and shipping information to reduce the possibility of an error. This interface supports entry of sales orders, modifications, cancellations and returns.
Order Status: This interface gives access to the real- time status on the orders. The users can track the order and get accurate information on delivery scheduled. Advance delivery notification can be sent to the customers.

Automated Order Fulfillment: The solution automates the entire order fulfillment shipping cycle starting from picking, packing to shipment confirmation. Depending on the need, organizations can customize enable automatic item pickups, packing a shipment. The shipment execution can be automatically grouped, in order to reduce the shipping and handling cost.

The Key Benefits of Order Management CRM:

• Improves operational efficiency.
• Captures accurate order and hence increases productivity.
• Flawless and timely order fulfillment.
• Enhanced customer experience through efficient and timely order fulfillment.
• Reduces operational cost through faster order entry and reduced order error.
• Increase in revenue through cross/up selling, maximization of margins and efficient order fulfillment.

CUSTOMER DATA INTEGRATION

Customer Data Integration (CDI) solution helps companies to centralize all the data from multiple systems, which can be leveraged by all departments. It consolidates provides and manages a single view of customer data, from all sources.

CDI is an integral part of CRM solution, which assures that most relevant and accurate customer information is always available to various departments and management of the company. The key attributes of CDI technology solution comprise of cleaning, chaining and consolidation of customer information as well as delivering the integrated data in the structure which meet the business needs.

Consolidation of Data: This program consolidates captured attributes for people, households and organizations in an extensible data model. It creates a general ID for each customer profile and creates a single record from various sources.

Cleans the Data: This interface scrubs the customer information by removing unnecessary and incomplete information. It also enriches the customer profile using per built integration and identifies and eliminates duplication.

Manages the Data: The work flow capabilities of the application control the customer data life cycle in a very impressive way. It has an ability to reverse events and restore the system to a previous point in time.

Shares the Data: Synchronizes relevant and accurate customer information with operational and analytical systems. It provides the gold plated customer records and allows integration with all other applications and analytical systems.

Key Benefits of CDI:

• Streamline the different functional process with company.
• Enhances customer experience and service by providing information across multiple channels.
• Improves sales and support processes across different customer channels.
• Supports management of customers across territories, different accounts and representative.
• Stimulates retention of customers and up-selling opportunities across various channels
• Enhance customer service based on product availability and logistics.
• Improve contractual and pricing efficiencies across buying organizations.
• Ensure compliance with local, state and federal regulations.
• Strengthen selling efforts by providing a complete view of customer data.
• Improve management of risk.

E-commerce CRM solutions enable organizations to enhance customer loyalty and improve their profitability. The E-commerce software empowers the customer with a personalized, online experience and convenience of self service.

The functionality delivers a strong and practical experience and acts as a mechanism to stimulate the sales and development of the company. It brings in innovation, superior customer focus, strengthens sales, and reduces cost.

The application supports the entire, e-commerce life cycle: E-commerce, E-marketing, E-Support, and Web Analytics. It supports complete sequence of activities, from initiation of the order to payment processes and delivers a user friendly, synergistic selling and self-services experience. It provides an easy, upgrade path to the entire, CRM application.

E-commerce: The solution empowers the customers to browse Catalogs, Pricing & Promotions, Keyword & Faceted Search, Product Comparison, Related Products, Product Recommendations, Product Configuration, Shopping Cart & Checkout, and Integrated Chat.

The software streamlines the total sales and order life cycle right from order initiation to completion. It offers an array of online-selling processes, comprising of order placement, quote, pricing and contracts management. It also aids interactive selling and configuration, web auctions, and selling via partners.

E-marketing: This module facilitates the marketing efforts, support demand and customer loyalty processes via Internet. The functionality of the solution supports complete, content & catalog management cycle, execution of campaigns, segmentation of customers, and store locator.

E-service: This is a channel which supports the e-service life cycle, from service visits, logging complaints, registering a product. It also enables users to check order status, manage accounts and payments.

Web channel analytics: With the assistance of this tool, the users can perform analysis across the extent of sales, service and marketing from a Web outlook. Furthermore, it can track and manage Web response to target customers and support future- marketing activities. The application has ability to maximum efficiency of the processes for the success of Web shop and online content.

Key Benefits of CRM E-Commerce Solution:

The functionality of this software sculptures around the client and makes a buying decision just a click away. It provides following key benefits:
• Increase sales and expand market reach by making more relevant offers.
• Personalized and Convenient Selling experience.
• Saves Time by giving an approach to find and buy products.
• Enhance customer loyalty.
• Increase conversion rate.
• Reduce the cost of sales and support by delivering reliable and accurate product, pricing, and customer data across all consumer touch points.
• Boost orders size.
• Accelerate- marketing processes with increased visibility and control
• Drive consumer demand with targeted- marketing messages.

E-BILLING CRM

E-Billing solution streamlines operations by providing the ability to host online interactive and personalized bills with different payment options. It enhances the customer experience and strengthens commitment by becoming an intrinsic mean of communication .It brings customers to the company’ Web site to view timely, personalized, and content in a reliable, private, and secure environment.

E-Billing Manager: E-Billing Manager enables organizations to deliver users and business buyer’s comprehensive, online access to bills and invoices. Customers receive an access to view online bills and multiple payment options. The solution enables delivery of E-Bills to the customers, along with highly secured, round the clock access to online bills. The interactive statements can be generated and delivered in both HTML of PDF.

Furthermore, Online Payment option generates receipts and enhances the effectiveness of the whole cycle. With online Eco-friendly Account Management, organizations operate Paperless, and lower printing and mailing costs.

Communication Billing Analytics: The CRM provides an analysis of cost to management as well as the individual employees to analyze, gives insight into utilization by navigating and recognizing modes and patterns across multiple views of their own, distinctive structure. The solution creates precise, historical and trend reports across billing period’s .It conducts probability analysis and provides fast, accurate updates between business organizations and reports. Distributes access to information throughout the company with hierarchical and role based reporting features.

E-Statement Manager: This solution is active in delivering interactive and personalized e-account statements to business and individual user/ clients. The application is useful in cost-effectively presenting different kinds of statements like commission, insurance, credit card based on the necessity of the company/ management. The software supports cost reduction with the use of paperless Statements—save printing and postage costs with the online-only statement options.

E-Payment Manager: This interface enables users to make payment online using different payment options. It adds convenience and improves service with secure payment options. Accelerates payment processing, speed up cash receipts and lower-cash float. The solution supports Paperless Accounts and contextual customer service.

Easy Pay Manager: The software enables organizations to receive payment within the time lines via different payment channels like customer service representatives, IVR/Web. As a result, Easy Pay streamlines collections systems and processes.

It increases organizational efficiency, provides reliability and confidence to the customers. It models different arrangements for collecting payments.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT CRM

Automating inventory in the CRM life cycle provides a corporation competitive advantage and leads to an array of satisfied customers. It empowers the companies to have a tighter control of stock level and thus cut on inventory cost. The users can see updated inventory levels on the web stores.
This application automates the entire CRM Inventory Management system:
Warehouse Management: This software streamlines the shipping process by organizing the warehouse using bins, to track the location of each item in stock. This enables the shipping and handling employees to locate and process the orders faster. This also streamlines the re-stocking process, by generating a list of goods received. One can manage a single warehouse or multiple and can be organized as per the stakeholder needs.
Cost Management: In order to maximize profits one needs to calculate accurately different cost (material/import), allocate overhead to inventory receipt. Hence this tool empowers the organization to work out the logistics by accurately calculating the landed cost.
Inventory Replenishment: The solution provides intuitive control over inventory replenishment. It ensures that enough stock is in hand to fill anticipated orders, but keeps excess inventory to a minimum. The user gets an ability to manage stock based on the anticipated demand (Lead time, Seasonal-based demand). The users can set up rules to manage refilling by creating and ordering the required items.
Customer and Volume Pricing/Multiple currency: With the assistance of this tool, the users can assign different prices for different types of customers. For example, one can set up different pricing for wholesale, retail or online sales. As per the necessity of the company, the application has a capacity to set up and calculate pricing in different currencies.
Integration: While creating new inventory items, the software enables users to determine the attributes, such as pricing, captions, images and more. The users have a clear visibility into inventory levels along with statistics on the ordered quantity.
Multi Location Inventory Management: This solution empowers users to manage inventory at different locations. It has an ability to select the warehouse which can fulfill the order commitment. The users can also generate inventory report and receive information on the inventory at a particular location.
Invoice Management: With Inventory Management CRM, the users can track outstanding invoices, customize invoice print layout and manage multiple invoice templates for different product lines. The solution automatically generates Total Cost by adding items, cost, and taxes on the invoice. E-invoices can be sent to customers.
Key Benefits of the Inventory CRM Management solution:•
• Streamlines the inventory management system, ensuring faster and accurate deliveries.•
• Great solution to manage and organize warehouses.
• Helps to accommodate volume and special orders.
• Powerful tool for Inventory analysis and profitability calculation.
• Easy to transfer stock.
• Inventory restocking-refilling process gets easy to manage.
• Control over inventory.
• Reduce inventory cost.

As we all know, that the changing pattern on how the organizations should operate has created a tremendous demand for Customer Relationship Management technology. The CRM application chains the CRM process, which is customer centric. It supports an extensive array of activities for acquiring, enhancing or retaining customers.

In a nut shell, CRM acts as a catalyst towards the development of any organization by streamlining processes and functionality of the company. The CRM software functionality varies from vendor to vendor. However, there’re a few modules common to most of the packaged CRM software.

Let examine how each of the CRM modules function and serves organizations.

SALES CRM

Sales CRM has a core commitment to strengthen the sale by automating the sales cycle. The application assists companies to develop, execute, analyze and strengthen sales operations. It’s also useful in finding new ways to step up buying decisions, unveil additional areas of earnings potential, and implement new methods to increase sales productivity.

The CRM key not only provides a plan for data visibility across the company, but also demonstrates its ability to provide immediate value to the sales team by improving their ability to sell, and significantly increasing their success rates.

The construction of sales CRM benefits all constituencies involved in the sales process and provides sales tools for managing the entire sales cycle. The sales management tools support the sales cycle by automating Lead Management, Opportunity Management, Sales forecasting, Account Management, Contact, Quote, Contract, pipeline, Territory, Activity, Team Selling, Workflow, Competition tracking.

The functionality of Sales CRM supports the following Sales Process:

Sales forecasting: With the use of Sales CRM, Sales Managers can improve performance with coordinated planning and implementation of sales activities across all channels. It provides a complete picture of projected income and anticipated sales volume over time. The solution also increases the accuracy of sales forecasts.

Territory management: The CRM solution will help the Sales Force to manage their territories& resources, optimize account coverage. It is also useful, in optimizing team performance, by placing the resources in the exact locations at the right time.

Account and Contact Management:Sales team can see a detailed description of their account, which will assist them in their account management activity. It also captures and tracks all necessary information about prospects, customers and partners.

Activity management: In general, most of sales professionals have to go through complex manual processes, resulting in a focus shift. By automating, the organizations can turn the collective spirit of their sales team on actions proven to develop a successful business. This will also encourage effective, team collaboration and coordination. The solution also synchronizes emails, contact, calendar entries and tasks.

Opportunity management: The functionality of Sales CRM enables managers to qualify, track, and map leads to appropriate sales professionals. It also monitors the transfer of opportunities into sales, monitor target attainment. It offers strategies to push deals through the sales cycle faster, and analyzes the quantity and quality of sales opportunities with pipeline performance management.

Quotation and order management: Sales CRM solution automates and generates accurate quotes, places orders, verify product availability, and track orders through to the fulfillment process. It synchronizes the billing activities and fulfillment of customer orders.

Pricing/Billing and Contract Management : In order to support the sales process the CRM Sales solution ensure consistent, accurate, and up-to-date pricing, Further, it develops and manages long-term customer contracts, incorporate customer agreements into ongoing customer processes, and watch the sales process from exploration to close. It provides integration with billing/finance departments to generate invoices, process payments, credit returns, and process claims.

To encapsulate, Sales CRM solution can provide an organization the following benefits: •

• Maximize profitable revenue growth.
• Reduce Cost.
• Strengthen Customer Relationship.
• Focus sales resources on productive activity.
• Optimize the value delivered with every customer interaction.
• Streamline end-to-end business sales processes across channels.
• Increase reliability with constant, personalized customer experiences across all touch points.

MARKETING CRM

Marketing CRM is a comprehensive solution which empowers an organization to achieve excellence in Marketing. It enables organizations to analyze, plan, develop and perform all marketing activities through all customer interaction points. This integrated software empowers marketers with real business insights enabling them to make intelligent business decisions and manage end-to-end-marketing processes.

The CRM solution seamlessly automates the marketing processes: Analytics, resource & brand management, campaign management, email marketing, segmentation and lead management.

The functionality of Marketing CRM supports critical marketing processes:

Marketing Analytics:The CRM solution allows an organization to achieve maximum results from marketing investments by providing the entire team with a complete, up-to-the-minute picture of consumer preferences, buying behavior, and profitability. Marketing Analytics helps one to develop closer, more valuable customer and prospect relationships and develop marketing success.

Resource and Brand management:Marketing CRM enables the Marketing Managers to perform effectively and optimize the use of marketing resources including budgets, people, time, and assets. They can align all activities and resources around strategic-marketing goals, along with accurately managing the marketing budgets and costs. This, in turn, facilitates collaboration among team members and coordinates marketing activities across the company.

Segmentation and Customer Data: It manages customer and prospect information and segments the customers based on different attribute.
Lead management: Automation of Marketing CRM supports to maintain a single source of all business lead details. It automates lead system from lead generation, prioritization, distribution, and follow-up processes.

Email Marketing: The solution enables organizations to take advantage of the superior economics of e-mail while building consumer confidence, respecting their preferences, and creating successful relationships. The marketing team can plan, create, test, execute, and track targeted, personalized e-mail communications, including time-sensitive alerts and event-triggered mailings. It is a complete solution for the planning, creation, execution, and analysis of targeted campaigns across all customer touch points.

Campaign Management: This streamlines the planning, execution, and budgeting of personalized, permission-based campaigns. It provides integrated work flow, collaboration capabilities for campaign support and implementation; financial modeling to optimize allocation of marketing dollars; and a marketing command center to track campaigns across the organization. Marketers can easily create and automate rich multistage, recurring, and event-triggered campaigns that involve different offers, approaches, and channels.

The key benefits of Marketing CRM Solution are: •

• It provides deeper and relevant customer insight: One understands product chemistry for targeted promotions, profile customers’ buying behavior for successful promotions, and achieves better insight into segmentation characteristics.
• It aligns marketing venture with the corporate vision: Consistently delivers the right message to the right customer at the right time, thus builds stronger relationships.
• It integrates with all the marketing and CRM processes, supporting the Customer Life cycle.
• Boost Campaign Performance: Track and measure campaign effectiveness in real time, understand factors that drive campaign results and lead conversion rates, and compare individual campaign results to focus metrics. One can achieve better campaign response rates.

SERVICE CRM

The Service CRM Solution aims to provide quicker service, increase efficiency of service agents and enhanced customer service. The software enables agents to manage service, support, and sales interactions seamlessly across all communication channels. As a result, businesses can reduce costs while enhancing service delivery.

The functionality of Service CRM supports critical service processes:

Sales and marketing for service: Service CRM Solution, aids in developing and executing targeted, installed-base- marketing campaigns. It generates and process service contract quotations and service orders.

Activity management: The software captures all applicable, service information quickly and reliably. Service agents can easily manage service requests, track related activities, record notes and customer emails and associate known solutions to incoming requests. This information can be easily accessed by service/sales professionals, so that when they call on customers, they have a true, 360° view of the customer, including open and resolved service requests.

Contract management: The program manage service contracts, automatically verify entitlement, manage service-level agreements, and alert agents when a customer’s contract is about to expire.

Customer service and support: It provides an access to information on service histories, contracts and service entitlements, service levels, installed base, and warranties.

Service Analytics: The solid solution helps the organization to review and manage key, service issue by providing detailed information about the customer/product/service call. Furthermore, it helps them in planning ahead and management of their resources.

SERVICE REQUEST MANAGEMENT: MANAGE ASSETS, PARTS, AND SERVICES Return and repair

The software automates the entire, return and repair process, including creating the return materials authorization, billing and shipping repaired products to customers, and issuing and tracking their orders.

Warranty ManagementIt manages the complete warranty and claims process, from return merchandise authorization to receipt and inspection. It ensures timely customer credits.

Management of Field resourcesThe Service representatives can organize, plan, and dispatch service resources to meet service demands. They can execute and validate service orders as well as manage stock spare parts.

Installation and maintenance: One can track the installations, minimize downtime with planned maintenance service and provide faster, accurate service.

Key Benefits of Service CRM may be listed down as:

• The solutions’ knowledge base provides sales and service agents with consistent preapproved answers of frequently asked questions.
• Improves agent productivity and business process automation with task-based user interface.
• Effective service management with enhanced search and query for structured and unstructured data.
• Increase the speed of service delivery.
• Improve first-contact resolution with on-the-spot information and resources needed to resolve issues.
• Increase customer retention by providing service employees with the information and tools they want to prevent churn.
• Boost field utilization through optimized resources and easy access to information.
• Drive revenues by offering relevant services and products based on consumer insights.

CONTACT CENTER CRM

Contact Center CRM solution streamlines and synchronizes the processes and rebuilds an enterprise’s call center into an indispensable part of its total sales, marketing, and service delivery cycle. The solution empowers the company to maximize customer loyalty, reduce costs and increase productivity.

With the assistance of this program, organizations get empowered to communicate more effectively with their customers, leading to organizational flexibility and enhanced customer satisfaction. It is a seamless solution to handle inbound and outbound interaction /transactions and gives managers access to reporting and analytical tools for smooth running of the call center. It automates the work flow and thus creates a fruitful interaction.

The functionality of Contact Center CRM supports key contact center processes:

Agent Management: The Contact center CRM streamlines the user interface for handling multiple channel interactions. The agents can manage their calls in an efficient and professional manner. They get the ability to record track calls and interactions. The solution allows call transfer to other agents or skill work groups, instant callbacks and dial out. Hence, empowers the Agents to serve customers with Web-based access to detailed customer interaction records which consists of agent notes, call recordings, emails and chat session details.

Supervisor Management:A Supervisor management tool provides the relevant information on time, enabling supervisors to make real-time decisions that increase customer satisfaction and contact center’s performance. Integrated real-time dashboards, historical reporting, and robust quality management capabilities simplify reporting and management across centers and agents. In addition, supervisors can easily monitor, collaborate, and manage agent calls.

Customer Service: The solution enables the contact center employees to communicate with their customers by phone, email and online chat sessions. It provides agents an access to precise customer information enabling them to research and diagnose problems, handle complaints, ratify contract entitlements, address consumer complaints, help with returned products, answer technical questions, make exchanges, and even schedule field services.

Sales and Marketing: CRM solution orchestrates all call centers’ efforts; including call lists, agent scripts, promotions, and other channels, and coordinates them with broader- marketing activities to establish a focus on qualified prospects. Agent gets an access to the relevant information they want to give to the prospects, resulting in more- qualified leads into the pipeline and therefore more- selling opportunities.

Contact Center Analytics: This solution empowers the organization to determine, predict, plan, and optimize the operations of the centers by analyzing customer interactions, business processes, and business opportunities, and use the knowledge gained to enhance customer-focused operations.

Key Benefits of Contact Center CRM:

• Improve operational efficiency through streamlined reporting and supervision across centers and agents.
• Increases the call center agent’s output with multiple interactions handling across channels.
• Supports employees across multiple locations.
• Provides means to route calls to the official agents for faster- call resolution. Increase sales and expand market reach by making more- relevant offers.
• Enhances and strengthens the customer contact center experience by resolving customer issues during the first call.
• Drives customer loyalty and demand through targeted, personalized telemarketing campaigns provides a regular customer experience across all communication channels.
• Helps to gain insight into contact center operations and trends.

PARTNER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMEN CRM

Partner Relationship CRM solution is a Web-based effort to improve partner relationships life cycle .The functionality of the software provides the organizations a comfort to manage and collaborate with partners on leads, opportunities and capital requests. It brings exceptional value for both trademark owners and partners by supporting the processes. The application becomes a base to recruit and retain partners, effectively, in order to increase sales.

The functionality of the solution supports the dominant partner relationship management processes:

Partner management With the assistance of PRM trademark owner gain an insight into partner channels. They use the system to facilitate data entry and manage partners, programs, leads, opportunities, funds, fund requests, and collateral. The partners and agents use one method for all interactions. Furthermore, the solution enables the company to absorb net new partners, plan and predetermine sales revenues,. It allows to sector partner base for more effective partner programs by tracking their trainings, certifications and most importantly compensation plans.

Channel marketing: The software acts as a platform for providing the partners with accurate information, supports consistent branding, manage joint-marketing campaigns with partners, and control channel- marketing funds and partner incentives. The functionality of the software acts as a catalyst to increase the demand of products. Consequently, it streamlines the entire processes in order to manage the campaigns, catalogs, content and leads. It also provides personalization features and a partner locator.

Channel sales: The partners gain an access to the knowledge base, tools, and expert advice. This motivates them to sell more and shores up the channel- selling process. The management gains insight into demand and can effectively forecast future business .The functionality of the software supports an array of channel sales processes, which consist of contact , account, activity, opportunity management, deal registration, and pipeline forecasting.

Partner order management: PRM solution streamlines the partner ordering management processes. It backs channel order life cycle which consist of quote & order life cycle, interactive selling, pricing, contracts, point of sale and channel inventory management.

Channel service: It empowers the partners with tools to resolve the problem and ongoing service relationships. PRM automates entire channel service life cycle which comprises of information management, planning of service resources, management of service order, live support to partner s warranty, return and complaints management.

Partner and channel analytics: PRM CRM solution acts as a strong-reporting tool. One can process different kinds of reports and conduct analyses in order to determine the coverage of the partners, their performance, sales and revenue figures, the return on your partner investments, your gross margins with partners, and partner utilization. Partners can also generate reports and do an analysis relevant to their business.

Key Benefits of PRM CRM Solution:

• Increase Channel Effectiveness.
• Gain visibility by track partners throughout the partner life cycle.
• Recruit and Manage partners.
• Increase channel revenue.
• Strengthen lead response and closure time.
• Optimize use of Resource.
• Share Best Practices.

Salesforce.com is a undoubtedly the strongest in the software as a service CRM industry. In CRM selling opportunities, Salesforce.com leads with sales force automation (SFA) and a suite of supporting tools.

Salesforce.com approaches the web-based CRM industry significantly different than any other software as a service competitor. The company’s main idea is “No Software”, a tag line illustration for the SaaS industry.

The SFA was Salesforce.com’s first product listing to the software as a service market. The company’s product management appears much more focused on adding additional software systems as opposed to advancing current products or adding weight to the CRM software modules. With no specific target market, the Company strives to serve all types and sizes of organizations.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Salesforce.com offers its service in different packages:

• Team Edition. 10 user work group limit. Limited functionality.•
• Group Edition: for 5 user license.•
• Professional Edition. Reduced functionality compared to Enterprise.•
• Enterprise Edition. •
• Unlimited Edition. Provides customers four more value added services .Unlimited permits an unlimited number of Salesforce generated applications on the AppExchange (Enterprise edition users can run a maximum of 10 AppExchange applications), increases storage per user to 120MB, provides access to Salesforce sandbox for testing, includes AppExchange mobile (via the Sendia acquisition) and training of Salesforce applications; and platinum support which includes an assigned support representative. •
• Platform Edition. This version gives users the ability to install and customize downloaded applications from AppExchange without the CRM. Software developers get access to Salesforce.com’s Multi-tenancy infrastructure and visual point-and-click tools with which to build their applications for a fee. Also included, the Apex Web Services API, analytics and the Apex code language. The users will use the underlying Salesforce.com hosting platform with the shared common data model, security architecture, interface, version tracking, and meta-data-based application development model provided by Salesforce.com’s .

MODULES

• Sales force Automation
• Partner Relationship Management
• Marketing Automation
• Customer Service and Support
• Content Management
• Innovation Management
• Real Time and Historical Analytics
• Desk Top and Mobile CRM
• Data Model Customization
• User Interface Customization
• Enterprise Administration

MARKET REVIEW

Salesforce.com’s skyrocketing growth is remarkably impressive. The company has succeeded in creating an enviable brand, a profitable business and shareholder returns. However, in many ways, Salesforce.com’s strategy places the company at crossroads.

The migration away from a Customer Relationship Management software solution toward a product platform or “SaaS operating system” as well as an emphasis on tools and third- party solutions may contribute to the ‘jack of all, master of none’ notion that makes its more traditional software as service CRM competitors significant upside.

Main competitors :

• Entellium and NetSuite at the low end
• RightNow and Aplicor in the high point .

However, Salesforce.com has its own weaknesses .Some of them may be delineated as :

• Lack of flexibility. While this solution does offer several customization tools, the fact is that Salesforce.com supports over half- million users using the same solution and varying too far from that solution is not a viable option.
• Lack of functionality. The company seems to use a tools approach (e.g. build it yourself with the Apex development language) to compensate for missing functionality that exists in competitor solutions such as Oracle on Demand and Aplicor.
• Systems downtime. Recurring system downtime and service interruptions over the last two years have been a major sore spot for many customers.

Microsoft offers flexible, easy-to-use CRM solutions designed for any business or government agency. Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitates the company to strengthen their customer relations, manage sales and marketing efforts and follow developments.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution braces a wide range intelligent features which are affordable and help meet users specific needs. These solutions empowers employees to perform at best output levels, to deliver high-quality services and effective communications, in order to achieve better results from sales and service business.

Microsoft Dynamics core purpose is to support its customers and benefits by:

• Enhance customer relationships by providing an understanding of consumer knowledge base and abridges team collaboration.
• Provides intuitive and related tools to boost productivity and accomplish goals.
• Single, flexible software that is useful and meets the needs of different departments within an organization.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Microsoft Dynamic CRM provides three main service options:

• In Premise or On Demand deployment with the flexibility to trade options when ever required.
• Option to purchase directly, subscribe or finance.
• Integrates with Microsoft Office Outlook, a Microsoft Office SharePoint portal, customer portal, Web or a mobile device.

The success of Microsoft Dynamics CRM lies in its:

• Brilliant integration with other Microsoft software and third-party solutions.
• Instant automation of business processes.
• Secured data customization and management.
• Web based service aids in building and strengthening integrations across organization.
• Offers flexible options for deployment, purchase, and access.
• User friendly and familiar interface as it functions like other Microsoft products.
• Tailored to the business needs with the assistance of extensive customization option.

MODULES

Microsoft Dynamics is available in 3 modules:

Sales: This module provides a highly intuitive interface with embedded Microsoft Office capabilities to increase sales productivity, streamline sales cycles, automate- lead management, and gain insights to drive more sales.

Customer Service: A Microsoft Dynamics CRM customer service solution supports customer service operation and converts it towards a strategic advantage. It provides access to the most comprehensive customer information, assisting the representatives to resolve issues quickly and reduce handling times. Consequently, it ensures delivery of consistent customer service and reduces operational cost.

Marketing: Microsoft Dynamic CRM marketing solution is flexible, easy to use, and engineered to fit any business. It assists to identify potential within the existing customer base. With marketing management and automation software from Microsoft Dynamics CRM, you can sell more effectively, improve productivity, and obtain actionable insight into your marketing campaigns.

MARKET REVIEW

Microsoft has several, large on-premise customer accounts, however no large software as a service- hosting accounts. Key on-premise CRM competitors include Sage SalesLogix and Maximizer. Microsoft occasionally competes with Oracle’s Siebel or Onyx in larger- on-premise deals. Key SaaS CRM competitors include Salesforce.com, Oracle OnDemand and Aplicor.

The main hurdles faced by Dynamic CRM are :

Many regard user interfaces and navigation as complex and unintuitive.
SaaS solution was late to market and does not yet compete well with SaaS pure plays.
Limited to small- business organizations

While Microsoft did originally brand the combined ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM applications under a collective (Great Plains) Dynamics banner and establish an enterprise level integration project, code named Project Green, intended to consolidate the applications into a common code base over a multiple year period, the plan failed and was eventually cancelled.

Today, the portfolio of Microsoft ERP and CRM products clearly overlap, convey no group synergy and cause unusual customer confusion. The Microsoft products require a one company focus, well defined product road map, common framework, common development teams (some development teams such as Solomon are outsourced and seem to be slightly more than software maintenance evolution) and normal distribution channel (the partners have authority for only one of the various enterprise applications).

The SAP CRM program offers immaculate functionality that supports sales, service and marketing processes. The application supports customer life cycle and therefore enables organizations to craft their strategies around the core objective of enhancing the customer experience and stimulating growth.

SAP CRM application has proven to boost Customer Relationships in more than 25 industries.

Usability of SAP CRM:

• Capitalize on customer insight
• Drive consumer demand with targeted- marketing messages,
• Identify and maintain high-value customers with customer loyalty programs •
• Streamline key business processes across customer touch points.•
• Adapt to changing the business and customer needs.•
• Improve front-line efficiency and effectiveness.•
• Reduce cost and increase your decision-making ability.•
• Align marketing resources to support organizational objectives.
• Understand the returns on your marketing spend.
• Accelerate-marketing processes with increased visibility and control

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

SAP CRM empowers the marketers to make intelligent decisions, by providing an insight into valuable business elements. The solutions help them to focus all their efforts on the customer to boost demand, increase retention of the customer better management of allocated resources.

SAP Sales On-Demand backs account and contact management, sales management, opportunity management, quotes, pipeline and forecasting, calendar and task management, integration to Microsoft Office applications.

SAP Marketing On-Demand comprise of Lead Management, Customer Segmentation, Campaign Management.

SAP Service On-Demand braces the customer support, help desk, escalation of calls, ticket management, distribution based of rules, routing of service tickets, service level monitoring and analytics on service.

MODULES

• Brightens User Experience : Magnifies CRM above usual process automation to a flexible, user-driven end-to-end business process execution platform that offers business users the ability to access what they want the way they need it•
• Pipeline Performance Management: Provides targeted, role-based interactive solution for sales representatives and sales management•
• Business Communications Management: Provides an all-IP software-based, end-to-end contact center solution, including queuing and routing capabilities, eliminating the need for costly communications hardware•
• Real-Time Offer Management: Makes real time recommendations; cross sell, up sell, retention, marketing messages or actions•
• Trade Promotion Management & Market Development Funds: Provides centralized management of all trade funds and capital related activities; budgeting, allocation, utilization, and expense•
• Service Parts Management: The solution backs the parts management, manages the inventory deployment and replenishment of part. It also ensures the placement of service parts, in order to reduce the service time and improve the effectiveness.
• Enterprise SOA: Provides modular, service-enabled processes.

MARKET REVIEW

While SAP claims to be the CRM software solution market leader, that affirmation is objected by Oracle and a bunch of analyst firms. SAP is aware that it must strengthen its CRM software solution in order to take on Oracle’s Siebel CRM solution.

SAP is not known for deployment of a single line of business applications such as CRM software, accounting software or distribution software. While SAP is an ERP global giant, its CRM claims and reputation are much more questionable. The company is using its back-office ERP weight to gain traction in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) market.

SAP’s On-Demand CRM product line remains in its first version. The product has limitations, complex to use and is short of intelligent feature sets found in more sophisticated competitive CRM hosted solutions. The On-Demand product line is unsuccessful in providing an offline edition, wireless edition and many other valuable tools provided by other SaaS CRM competitors.

With the addition of Siebel’s leading CRM solutions, (June 1, 06) Oracle now offers a complete, complementary, world-class number of customer-centric applications. Oracle Siebel CRM is the world’s most comprehensive CRM solutions.

Functionality of Siebel CRM helps organizations to distinct their business in order to achieve maximum top-and bottom-line growth. It provides tailored solutions to more than 20 industries. It offers a combination of transactional, analytical, and contractual features to handle all customer facing operations.

Siebel’s biggest advantage is the sheer brilliance and breadth of its functionality. Siebel products are continually rated at the top in sales, marketing and customer service, as well as secondary CRM areas.

FEATURES AND ADVANTAGES

Oracle Siebel stands out as the most comprehensive CRM solution. It benefits the sales, marketing, support, contact center, order management and customer data management capabilities of an organization. Consequently the organizations establish an array of satisfied customers.

It has options specific to the industry and thus provides tailoring of total CRM as per the business needs. Hence, enhances the customer experience and provides a competitive advantage to the company.

Additionally, it offers flexibility to companies, with the option to have it ““On Demand” which is an efficient, cost-effective way to manage your technology over the long term.

The main advantages of “ON Demand CRM” are:

• Liberate the company from daily software maintenance routines.
• Strikingly lower operational risks and cost.
• Users throughout the organizations can benefit from the CRM capabilities, irrespective of their location.

With the prebuilt integration, it coordinated business processes, business rules, decision support resulting in reduced operational cost and improved customer satisfaction.

MODULES OF ORACLE SIEBEL

Oracle Siebel, as mentioned earlier is available “On Premises” or “On Demand”. Further they are offered in the following modules
• SALES
• MARKETING
• CONTACT CENTER AND SERVICE
• SELF SERVICE AN
• E-BILLING
• CONTACT CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE
• ORACLE CRM ON DEMAND
• PARTNER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
• QUOTE AND ORDER CAPTURE
• PRICE MANAGEMENT
• CUSTOMER DATA INTERGRATION
• BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE APPLICATION

REVIEW

Oracle Siebel CRM is the world-wide leader which backs over 20 industries with its industry specific CRM application. Oracle Siebel is rated as the number one CRM solution by topmost of Market research organizations. Analyst firm IDC reports that Oracle Siebel CRM is the leader in the Customer Relationship Management software categories of sales force automation (SFA), marketing and customer service.

Within the transactional CRM applications market, Oracle is ranked the number vendor with a 15.6% market share. Research firm Datamonitor also names Oracle CRM the principal leader in the CRM software market.

According to the Datamonitor , Decision Matrix, “Oracle’s CRM products, and especially Oracle Siebel CRM, are among the best solutions in almost every facet of CRM technology, outpacing all other competitors.

To encapsulate, Oracle’s Siebel CRM is a brilliant and powerful CRM solution. It empowers the organizations to improve their customer experience with its distinctive and user friendly customer service functionalities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a business conviction that involves identifying, understanding and providing superior solutions for your customers in the context of a relationship which improves customer satisfaction and maximize profits. CRM is about understanding, anticipating and responding to customers’ needs.
Since we are in the information (technology and knowledge age), there is a growing demand for adept CRM software solutions because studies have shown that a decent CRM package can increase sales by as much as 40-50%!

A strong CRM suite is a must-have in today’s business world if one wants to develop, manage, and increase your business because CRM helps organizations retain customers and at the same time expand customer base.

Any businesses, large or small needs a CRM solution that is a perfect fit for them since CRM solutions can be used out of the box or customized.

Most popular CRM Applications may be delineated as:

1. Oracle Siebel CRM
2. SAP
3. Microsoft Dynamics
4. Sales force
5. Sugar CRM
6. Aplicor
7. Zoho CRM
8. Right Now
9. Epiphany
10. Maximizer Software

Hello, I would like to address a question on the mind of almost every client I meet … “Can You Build A Fully Functional Web Application Overnight Or With Zero Coding”?

The answer to this frequently asked question is Yes, you can!

You can create complete web applications without having a web developer sit down on a computer and write a line of computer programming code.

Now, I am not saying that every every single web application can be developed overnight without writing a line of code … it really depends on the amount of custom or specialized business logic employed by your web application.

For example, if your business or web application has a lot of custom or specialized business rules, then there is little to no chance that we can create a web application for you from scratch without writing a line of code.

However in a situation like this, we may be able to significantly reduce the amount of custom code that is written by carefully separating out your highly specialized business logic from what is considered more traditional, routine data-entry or data presentation logic.

Here is one of the secrets of rapid application development … by carefully separating out your business logic from the rest of the generic application code, we can significantly accelerate the code development for the rest of your web or windows software project with a high-end code generation tools.

If your web or business application does not contain a lot of truly specialized custom business logic, then we can create the majority of your application without writing code a line of code by hand. Sometimes this may mean that we can create a new web application for you in 24 hours or less.

Finally, you have to choose carefully what you consider to be custom, specialized business logic because a lot of the functionality that people assume to be custom or specialized business logic is not really that at all and a lot of what they traditionally overlook especially in the User Interface layer (the behavior of web pages or windows application) is actually highly specialized presentation layer logic or business logic.

To take advantage of our software development expertise, take a moment to contact us.