April 2012 – CRM & Data Quality

Good customer service used to be one of the secrets to business success, but it seems that in our digitally driven business thinking, with automated processes and systems, we got lost, wondering why with all the data at hand today, customers are often even farther away from us than ever before.

Selecting the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can be challenging, especially if you require high functionality and specific CRM functions to derive value from the selected platform.

In the past ten years, new media have changed the relationship between companies and customers more than anything before, forcing today’s marketing approaches to be customer-oriented by aligning the entire organization to the needs of target groups.

Customer relationship management is crucial, but organizations also need to manage many other relationships that are integral to success: employees, partners, suppliers, distributors, vendors, and many other critical stakeholders.

The xRM concept has evolved over the past ten years from the sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications of the previous decade to the sophisticated everything (x) management solutions of today. xRM allows you to leverage technology to create efficiencies and become more profitable.

visual4, a media company from Stuttgart, Germany, compared three open source CRM systems in a study – XRMS CRM, vtiger CRM and SugarCRM – and also added the commercial open source CRM info@hand for better comparison. As it is not easy for small and medium sized companies to evaluate and chose the appropriate application, I

According to Dr. Nils Hafner, professor for CRM at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, who is at the same time head of the Customer Competence Institute in Switzerland and Germany, the most important worldwide CRM Future Trends are:

Communication with customers is changing as rapidly as online environments are developing. Especially with mobility increasing so fast, companies are faced with having to adapt and expand their customer contact channels in the CRM environment.

For two good reasons the business world’s emphasis on managing the customer experience has quickly evolved from a tactical sales and service challenge to a C-level topic with strategic implications:

In response to rising demand for powerful social computing solutions on the Microsoft platform, NewsGator is aggressively expanding into the Asia-Pacific region.