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Source : Salesforce
8 CRM Essentials: An Executive Guide to the Must-have Elements of Every Successful CRM Initiative
Customer relationship management (CRM) is also known as :
Customer Intelligence,
Customer Service ,
Consumer Relationship System,
Business Intelligence,
Client Relationship Management,
Enterprise Relationship Management,
Consumer Relationship System,
Employee Experience Management,
Customer Experience,
Customer Experience Management,
Service System,
Relationship Management,
Customer Experience Solutions,
Services Management,
Customer Relationship Management Strategy,
Contents
- Introduction
- The Eight CRM Essentials
- CRM Essential
1: Rapid Time to Value
- CASE STUDY: Ryder
- CRM Essential
2: Point-and-Click Customization
- CASE STUDY: DoubleClick
- CRM Essential
3: A 360-Degree Customer View
- CASE STUDY:Harris Interactive
- CRM Essential
4: Real-Time Visibility
- CASE STUDY:Genesys Conferencing
- CRM Essential
5: No More Dirty Data
- CASE STUDY:Millennium & Copthorne Hotels PLC
- CRM Essential
6: High Adoption
- CASE STUDY: Symantec
- CRM Essential
7: Extending Your Success
- CASE STUDY: Altium
- CRM Essential
8: A Broad Community
- CASE STUDY: Successforce.com
- Conclusion
Introduction
It"s no secret that winning and retaining customers is the key to business growth and success. But
that"s no small feat given the dynamic and ever-increasing customer demands that companies face
today, as well as the difficulty of implementing and enforcing processes to effectively support your
interactions with prospects, customers, and partners. Fortunately, there are dozens of technology
products devoted to helping companies manage those critical relationships"commonly known as
customer relationship management or CRM.
To thrive, companies must focus on customer relationships and CRM strategies. For the most
successful companies, CRM is an area of continual innovation and assessment. And your CRM
processes and technologies must keep pace with"or ideally stay ahead of"changes in your market
and customer base.
If you are searching for the right CRM technology for your business, re-evaluating your current use
of CRM, or looking to derive more value from an existing investment, understanding the essential
factors of CRM success can help you get the best results.
This guide to eight proven CRM essentials distills best practices, lessons learned, and collective
insights from salesforce.com"s 35,000+ customers"as well as industry experts"across various
company sizes, geographies, and vertical markets.
The Eight CRM Essentials
- Rapid time to value
- Point-and-click customization
- A 360-degree customer view
- Real-time visibility
- No more dirty data
- High adoption
- Extending your success
- A broad community
Whether you are a Fortune 100 company or a one-person outfit, if your business cares about
cultivating strong customer relationships, these essential elements of successful CRM provide
valuable guidance for your own CRM initiatives.
CRM Success Stories
| 24 Hour Fitness | Cognos | Kelly Services |
| ADP | Corporate Express | Panasonic Network Services |
| AMD | Delta Dental | Quantum |
| Air Products | Electronic Arts | Ryder |
| Avis Budget Group | Expedia Corporate Travel | Sprint Nextel |
| Borland | Genesys Conferencing | SunEdison |
| Cars.com | Harris Interactive | SunTrust Banks |
| Chase Paymentech Solutions | Hitachi Software | Symantec |
| Chrysler Financial | The HoneyBaked Ham Company of Georgia | Time Warner Cable Business Class |
| Cisco | Kaiser Permanente | Yamaha Corporation of America |
CRM Essential
1: Rapid Time to Value
Instant messaging, 24/7 customer service, shorter development cycles&8230; today, businesses and their
customers move at a rapid clip. Buy decisions are made quickly, and in fact entire businesses can
succeed or fail in a matter of weeks. That means that the no one has the luxury of waiting months
or even years to install a traditional, expensive, client/server CRM application. The competitive
advantage today is on-demand CRM.
On-demand CRM solutions are better suited to today"s fast-moving businesses. You can be upand-
running with on-demand CRM in a matter of weeks, so you can focus on delivering greater
value to customers, rather than worrying about installing and maintaining hardware and software.
Unfortunately, many companies do exactly that"spend too much time managing IT infrastructure
and not enough time on the business. According to Gartner, "Eight out of 10 dollars you spend in
IT is dead because, while it is keeping the lights on, it isn"t directly contributing to your business
growth or to enhancing your competitive advantage." ["The 2006 Gartner Symposium Keynote:
IT Must Think Differently, Act Differently and Be Different to Drive Business Growth," by Mark
Raskino, et. al., October 19, 2006.] With no software to install or upgrade and no hardware to
house and manage, on-demand CRM frees IT to be more innovative, responsive, and strategic for
your organization.
By leveraging an agile, on-demand platform, you begin seeing the benefits of CRM immediately.
- Concentrate on your business initiatives. There"s no hardware or software to buy or install.
- Let your users get started right away. Born-on-the-Web CRM solutions are as easy to use as
the consumer Web"anyone familiar with Amazon.com or My Yahoo! will be comfortable with
the Web interface of on-demand CRM.
- Accommodate global requirements quickly. You can manage multiple languages and
currencies as easily as English and U.S. dollars.
- Get a custom solution for your specific needs quickly. With a few clicks of the mouse, you
can make departmental, regional, or global changes; add custom data fields, new users, and
workflow rules; and even create new applications.
With the on-demand model, customer-facing employees"and strapped IT teams"no longer have
to get embroiled in complicated, time-consuming, high maintenance technology projects. Not only
does on-demand CRM deliver numerous business benefits, it does so quickly and with minimal
distractions and hassles for your busy teams, so they can focus on your business, not on technology.
CASE STUDY:
Ryder Accelerates Close Rates and Increases Contract Renewals
As a Fortune 500 provider of leading-edge transportation logistics and supply chain management
solutions worldwide, Ryder wanted to enhance business processes and measure CRM in its supply
chain solutions division. Multiple silos of customer information and a lack of visibility into its
global sales pipeline hindered the company"s effectiveness in retaining customers, responding to
opportunities, and closing deals. The most compelling CRM solution for them was a Web-based
one so that they could quickly deploy it without getting internal IT staff involved.
"Sales visibility was non-existent and processes were all very manual prior to Salesforce," says
Hernan Vera, group director at Ryder. "We implemented Salesforce in 30 days, and we have seen
increasing benefits ever since."
"Salesforce helped
us deliver leads that
have resulted in more
than $200 million
in proposals to our
salespeople&8230; we"ve
seen significant
improvements in our
retention of contracts,
on the multimilliondollar
level."
" Hernan VeraGroup Director
Ryder
CRM Essential
2: Point-and-Click Customization
No CRM solution is going to fit like a glove right out of the box, because the reality is that no
two companies" customer relationships and processes are exactly alike. However, because many
traditional CRM solutions are difficult and expensive to customize, some organizations are forced
to alter their business processes to fit the capabilities of their CRM technology. The key to success
is a highly flexible CRM solution that allows you to keep pace with changing customer needs and
your evolving business environment.
On-demand CRM is uniquely suited to adapt to changing needs in real time. No matter what type
of business you"re in, how big or small your company is, or how unique your customer relationships
are, your organization will benefit from the flexibility that the on-demand model provides.
- Configure any field, workflow rule, page layout, or report with a few clicks. Implement
changes for specific users and teams, and take control of the entire customer lifecycle"
marketing campaigns, leads, opportunities, customer service and support, etc.
- Create custom applications for your unique processes or add other best-of-breed on-demand
applications"without programming.
- Roll out CRM in additional languages and currencies instantly for your colleagues in other
geographies.
The ease with which we can point and click our way to customizing consumer Web pages has
dramatically raised everyone"s expectations for implementing changes even in business applications.
Only the on-demand model can accommodate quick customizations on an ongoing basis, making
the weeks or months it takes to make even simple changes to traditional software seem hopelessly
old-fashioned.
CASE STUDY:
DoubleClick Finds Custom CRM a Good Fit for Global Business Needs
DoubleClick, a leading provider of digital marketing technology and services, needed a CRM
solution that would support rapidly-growing global sales, marketing and service operations with
diverse needs. In addition to merging sales, marketing, and customer service and support databases,
Salesforce enabled DoubleClick to react quickly to changing business needs. Customizations
included monitoring press mentions to support European brand awareness and perception goals,
and tracking RFP responses for better allocation of resources and increased ROI worldwide.
During its two years of use, DoubleClick has created countless additional customizations and
extensions"large and small"to Salesforce. One of the most impressive aspects of the company"s
implementation is the fact that a single DoubleClick employee implemented all of the customizations.
"Customization is very smooth," says Nicole Widder, Salesforce administrator. "We can turn around
requests for new capabilities within days, which wasn"t the case prior to using Salesforce."
"Our business
changes constantly.
New products, new
markets, and new
strategies are business
as usual. We selected
Salesforce because
we needed a solution
we could modify,
customize, and extend
to keep pace with our
expanding business. "
" Nicole Widder
Salesforce.com Administrator
DoubleClick
The quality of the customer experience makes and breaks companies. Customers are becoming
increasingly demanding and sophisticated, and they"ll take their business elsewhere if you don"t
deliver the superior service they feel they deserve. Companies today are challenged to integrate
and manage the complete customer lifecycle"seamlessly and effectively"to win and retain those
highly desirable most-profitable customers. For many companies, the underlying, proven formula
for success involves using on-demand CRM across all those critical customer touch points.
Too often, sales, operations, marketing, customer service, help desk support, professional services,
and other customer-facing organizations use disparate systems, so no one has a complete picture of
the customer. With a multitenant, on-demand CRM solution, customer information and activities
are easily unified and shared so that every department has a 360-degree view of the customer and
can provide quicker, better service.
- Leads go directly to the right sales team or individual rep, are well qualified, and include the
right information.
- Marketing gets real-time visibility into the status of every lead, sees which lead sources drive
the most revenue, and plans appropriate customer marketing campaigns.
- Service and support organizations get visibility into which products or services the customer
is using and any pending sales opportunities, and can alert the sales team to potential cross-sell
and up-sell opportunities.
- Back in sales, reps get insight into any outstanding customer service issues so that there are no
unpleasant surprises when they make their sales calls.
With a common CRM system, each department can be more effective and productive in every
customer interaction, and each employee can put his/her best foot forward and provide superior,
consistent service.
CASE STUDY:
Harris Interactive Improves Forecasting Capabilities 100 Percent
Harris Interactive needed to manage its sales teams and operations more effectively. It also
needed to scale resources to contain costs and improve cross-functional support. This required
improving communication. To achieve this goal, the company required a common system that
everyone in the company"from sales and marketing to research and finance"could use to
access client information.
Since the rollout of Salesforce, global access to sales information has enabled better supplychain
planning. For instance, supply-chain efficiency has doubled. And sales forecasting
accuracy, which Dan Chiazza, Harris Interactive"s senior manager of global sales and database
operations, says used to be "highly unpredictable," has improved "100 percent, thanks to
advanced pipeline management."
"Ask our president,
and he"ll say Salesforce
is the most important
application in the
organization. All sales
and marketing-related
functions manage
their day through
the application."
" Dan Chiazza
Director, Global Sales Operations
Harris Interactive
CRM Essential
4: Real-Time Visibility
To stay competitive, businesses must "mind their metrics." Constantly monitoring the health of
the business, determining what"s working and what"s not, and making adjustments to improve
operations and increase revenue are essential to surviving and thriving in today"s competitive
market. As easy as it sounds, every executive knows that too often, it"s difficult or impossible to get
the timely analysis you need to effectively run the business.
With traditional enterprise software, getting tailored reports usually requires IT involvement
and days or weeks of waiting. With on-demand CRM, business intelligence is democratized.
Executives and managers finally have instant visibility into all aspects of the business"everything
from a bird"s-eye view to the micro-level details. Running reports and setting up real-time
dashboards require just a few clicks. No more consolidating disparate spreadsheets and working
with data that"s days or weeks old. Executives in every department can get the total customer
insight they need to build a stronger, more profitable business.
- Sales executives get better insight into customer information and sales activities and finally
have instant access to accurate pipeline information and forecasts. And with the ability to add
partner relationship management, channel sales can be managed right alongside inside sales, for
an integrated view of all your sales activities.
- Marketing executives can measure and manage the effectiveness of their campaigns and tie
revenue back to individual marketing activities. Finally, marketing ROI is measurable.
- Customer service and support executives have access to up-to-the minute information about
global service operations"such as agent performance and service quality"so that they can
make the right adjustments and implement changes that will have a positive impact, quickly.
Analytics can be addictive, and there are literally hundreds of CRM metrics you can track. Your
CRM metrics should track to your organization"s other financial and business objectives. In
addition, the CRM metrics you choose will be specific to your company"s size, product lifecycle,
and your corporate mission. The key is to get good insight without becoming a slave to the metrics.
To avoid that, it"s best to identify the smallest number of performance metrics that can still
properly encapsulate the business objective.
For example, a new company with a promising but unknown product will need to invest heavily in
marketing campaigns to solicit customers, build product awareness, and establish its brand.
The company would want to keep close track of metrics such as new leads per marketing campaign,
sales opportunities per campaign, and opportunities closed per campaign. On the other hand, a
company with a well-established brand, a large customer base, and a mature portfolio of products
would want to focus on metrics that help identify its most profitable customers and show which
programs further increase their customers" spending and ensure their loyalty. This company would
want to track up-sells and cross-sells with metrics such as the number of products or services per
customer and average profit per customer.
Even small investments in dashboards and reporting for all your customer-facing employees can
have a profound impact on business performance. Metrics motivate.
CASE STUDY:
Genesys Conferencing Maximizes Sales and Service Effectiveness
Genesys Conferencing is a leading provider of integrated Web, audio, and video conferencing
services. They were challenged with a fragmented view of their 18,000+ customers and wanted
to unify their global sales, marketing, and service information. There was no integration between
the sales and customer service systems; each country required its own technology infrastructure to
support the on-premise solutions; and global visibility into the business was haphazard.
Salesforce helped Genesys overcome these challenges. "The rich, pre-packaged functionality
provided Genesys with global visibility into every account"including the status on every deal,
a real-time view of every customer support issue, and an instant snapshot of our marketing
campaigns," says Marcus Johansson, MIS project leader, CRM, at Genesys.
"Our account
teams now share sales
opportunities worldwide.
By facilitating global
collaboration, we
can work together
to close more deals,
more quickly."
" Marcus Johansson
MIS Project Leader,
CRM Genesys Conferencing
CRM Essential
5: No More Dirty Data
Almost every company suffers from "dirty data" syndrome, and few have any idea what to do about
it. Consider the findings of the IBM Global Data Management Survey of 600 major enterprises:
75 percent of the respondents reported significant problems as a result of defective data, including
violated contract terms, failure to bill or collect for services or products delivered, delays in or
abandonment of new systems projects, and extra accounting costs.
You can"t be successful with CRM until you find a remedy to the data integrity problem that is
prevalent in organizations of all sizes and in every industry. A three-step approach to quality data
management can address this issue so that your CRM initiative will be free of dirty data.
- Capture. If you don"t capture it, you can"t measure it. In order to capture all the data you need to
get an accurate analysis of your business, you need everyone in the company to use your CRM
system rather than store data in unintegrated or offline sources such as spreadsheets. To get
quality data, high system adoption is critical. You can also capture customer information (such
as leads) from your Web site to populate your CRM system.
- Clean. Once you have the data in your CRM system, you need to continually weed out bad
data by removing duplicates, synchronizing changing data, and updating information. You
should have the flexibility to leverage data cleansing applications that tie in with your CRM.
- Augment. Merely cleansing your data is not enough. Maintaining high data quality also means
filling in the blanks. For example, some of your account records may be missing company
information such as revenue, number of employees, key executives, and so on. You can augment
your data by leveraging data service providers to help you fill in the gaps. Providing your teams
with full details on their customers or potential customers in one spot makes them more
effective at in-depth analysis and prospecting.
A centralized customer data repository is the critical foundation of any CRM initiative. As with
any data-driven application, the quality of the data determines the achievable level of success. The
creation of an accurate, timely, information-rich, centralized view of the customer across channels
and lines of business is a key enabler for reducing costs, managing risk, and increasing revenue and
profitability in customer-centric organizations.
Research shows CEOs around the globe are demanding this single view of the customer. Savvy
executives know that clean customer data is much less costly than not having enough insight to
make intelligent business decisions or losing customers to poor service. So what better time to kick
off a project to whip your customer data into shape?
CASE STUDY:
Millennium & Copthorne Hotels Books Successful Customer Relationships with
Improved Data Quality
Millennium & Copthorne Hotels PLC, with 90 hotels in 17 countries, needed to build the
effectiveness of its corporate sales force and maximize customer relationships by better managing
and sharing corporate customer information across territories.
Prior to implementing Salesforce, salespeople had been using a combination of individual Excel
spreadsheets and paper to track customer information. Sharing information was difficult, time
consuming, and 'most importantly -- far from accurate. With Salesforce, Millennium and
Copthorne put in place a centralized resource so customer information could be distributed across
territories. With this resource in place, Millennium and Copthorne could put in place the real-time
communication that the company required to build the effectiveness of its corporate sales force and
maximize customer relationships.
"We needed a solution
to the problem of
sharing and managing
customer information
across all our territories.
Using Salesforce, we
now have a centralised
resource which helps
us to improve customer
service and maximise
sales opportunities
across the region. "
" Fiona Cole
Sales Development Manager
Millennium & Copthorne Hotels PLC
CRM Essential
6: High Adoption
There"s nothing worse than investing in CRM and having no one show up. Too many CRM
projects fail due to poor user adoption. After all, technology is only as good as the people who use
it. To ensure that people do use your CRM system, it must be easy to use, accessible, and scalable,
and significantly enhance productivity, efficiency, and visibility. On-demand CRM solutions that
are delivered via a Web browser encourage adoption by replicating the familiar point-and-click
interfaces of popular consumer Web sites, where everything must be user friendly.
A look at successful CRM initiatives uncovers several best practices for driving user adoption.
- Build support for CRM early on. You should communicate your CRM strategy and timeline
to key stakeholders well in advance of the implementation to set expectations.
- Go top down, bottom up, and sideways. After securing an executive sponsor, have him or
her send a communication to the company to reinforce the importance of the initiative and
encourage participation. You should also cultivate active and vocal advocates/end users to drum
up support among the troops and identify team project members from all affected areas of the
organization.
- Focus on people and processes. You need to recruit people who know the day-to-day activities
of your user community, work with them to thoroughly document business processes, and
customize the CRM application to reflect those processes.
- Make your users" lives easier. It must be easy for users to sync information with their other
productivity tools, like Microsoft Outlook. Integrating with related systems provides a
one-stop-shop for all the information users need. And you can delight users by providing
unexpected information of value, right when and where they need it. For example, when a user
enters competitive information about a deal into the CRM application, point him/her to the
location of materials on how to sell against that competitor.
- Let them take it on the road. For mobile employees such as field sales reps, nothing boosts
productivity and user satisfaction more than providing CRM access from the field.
- Keep it simple. Provide users with information relevant to their everyday tasks. Don"t
overburden them with excess information that will distract them and impact productivity.
Customize the views that each team and user type sees, so that an individual user sees only the
information relevant to his/her role or project.
- Train you users in advance. You should develop online and custom training to reinforce your
unique processes, roles, and terminology. Even the easiest-to-use CRM system benefits from
custom training to show users how the system relates to your company.
- Give executives"and everyone"a bird"s-eye view. Give every executive a dashboard that
provides instant visibility into all the metrics he/she cares about. Empower every user to create
his/her own reports without having to wait for the system administrator or IT team.
- Reinforce adoption with carrots and sticks. Build CRM usage with incentive programs such
as spiffs, contests, etc. ("carrots"). And for those who are more motivated by fear, reinforce the
importance of using CRM with "sticks," such as executive communications and programs that
tie usage to highly desirable results, the most popular of which is to only pay commissions on
opportunities that were created in the application. Validate adoption using reports, dashboards,
and spot checks.
- Give everyone a voice. Encouraging feedback creates a sense of collective ownership and
investment in the system. By encouraging feedback"and responding to it by customizing the
application to incorporate good suggestions"is an excellent way to build adoption.
Investments in encouraging CRM adoption reap big rewards. Not only will you enforce your
business processes and increase productivity, but the more your teams use CRM, the more valuable
the data and analyses it produces will be.
CASE STUDY:
Symantec Drives Enterprise Success: 3,900 Users, 40 Countries, and
11 Languages
Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software. When the company merged with Veritas
Software, it had four disparate on-premise CRM systems, creating silos of customer data. Not only
did Symantec need to consolidate these systems, but the company was faced with the demands of
integrating Veritas" sales reps into its existing sales force. A smooth unification was critical.
In the end, the evaluation project team chose to replace all existing systems with Salesforce for
its ease of use and superior performance"even in remote sites. "Best practices were built into the
system via the intuitive user interface, which made training and adoption quite easy. The salesforce.
com on-demand delivery model was what we ultimately saw as key to getting the 3,900 people on
one tool," says Will Short, senior director of global sales infrastructure at Symantec.
"With consistent
performance and ease
of use, Salesforce
enables us to react
quickly to business
needs on a global scale.
This translates to greater
efficiencies and longterm
success across our
entire organization."
" Will Shortt
Senior Director,
Global Sales Infrastructure Symantec
CRM Essential
7: Extending Your Success
Business is about evolution. Smart and successful companies are flexible enough to adapt as
necessary while never letting go of the core mission and values. If your business must be nimble
to survive, why should you commit to a rigid, inflexible technology solution for something as
important and core to your business as CRM? The ability to tie-in additional best-of-breed
applications that address other key business initiatives and processes is essential to the long-term
success of your CRM solution.
On-demand CRM embraces the latest Web services technologies so that companies can take the
on-demand model beyond CRM by plugging in other Web solutions or even building custom ondemand
applications easily and quickly.
With Salesforce CRM, for example, customers can find, test drive, and quickly install additional
applications from the AppExchange. This unique marketplace offers hundreds of pre-integrated
applications"from salesforce.com, developers, and partners"that supplement the core Salesforce
CRM functionality or automate entirely different business processes, such as human resources,
finance, administration, and operations. These applications have all the benefits of on-demand
CRM: no infrastructure or hardware requirements, easy customization, real-time insight, and more.
CRM is not an island. Because it touches so many aspects of your business, you want to make sure
that your CRM system can flexibly accommodate related processes and applications. Like many
other companies, you may find that once you get started with on-demand and begin realizing the
many benefits of the model, you will want to find other processes and applications to bring onto
your on-demand platform.
CASE STUDY:
Altium Creates and Deploys Six Critical Business Applications in Just 4 Weeks with
Salesforce Unlimited Edition and the Force.com Platform
Altium Limited, a leading developer of electronics design software, had just four weeks to get ready
for its next peak business period. And although AltiumOne"the company"s existing homegrown
system"normally performed adequately, the last peak period showed that it could not scale to
meet the company"s increased demand.
Company executives discovered that Salesforce and the Force.com platform were philosophically
aligned with their business in many ways. "It"s a simple yet highly sophisticated platform, and we
quickly saw that it could be customized to fit our needs without the pain, cost, and timelines of the
traditional solutions we considered," explains Altium"s CIO.
For Altium, the AppExchange marketplace served as a fountain of ideas and as the springboard
for the development of six applications that leveraged Altium"s .NET development environment
and resources:
- Quoting. Altium customized a sales quote AppExchange application to create printed quotes
with multiple product lines and multilingual content, with a layout that conforms to local postal
requirements. This application also creates a sales order in Altium"s ERP system and routes it to
the appropriate warehouse for shipment. The processed order is then fed back into Salesforce so
that sales representatives can view the status of customer orders.
- Purchase Orders. Altium"s new purchase order system streamlines purchasing, improves the
visibility of expenditures, and includes sophisticated workflow functionality.
- Project Management. Altium installed and customized a project and issue management
AppExchange application to support the company"s unique business requirements for tracking
complex global projects involving multiple groups and external partners.
- Electronic Component Management. Using multiple development tools included in Force.
com Builder, this application tracks Altium"s inventory of electronic components such as
capacitors, resistors, and diodes and maps each component to a series of purchase items from
various suppliers, as well as to a series of electronic models such as 2-D printed-circuit-board
footprints, 3-D models, and schematic symbols.
- Customer Request and Campaign Management. Developed with salesforce.com"s AJAX
toolkit, this application allows customers to request downloads, product orders, support cases,
and bookings for events through the company Web site, which is integrated with the system.
- Support Case Management. Altium used Salesforce"s powerful dashboard analytics to provide
information to Altium"s global customer care department about pending support requests.
"It"s a simple yet
highly sophisticated
platform, and we quickly
saw that it could be
customized to fit our
needs without the pain,
cost, and timelines of
the traditional solutions
we considered."
" CIO
Altium Limited
CRM Essential
8: A Broad Community
Community-building Web technologies and sites are some of the most popular and fastestgrowing
areas on the Internet today. Through blogs, wikis, social and business networking sites,
and much more"people are increasingly engaging with each other online. At the same time,
companies are realizing that nurturing their customer communities and engaging with customers
can yield dramatic results in terms of customer loyalty and brand awareness. At the cross section of
these two trends is on-demand CRM: the perfect enabler of community growth.
On-demand CRM solutions can help build and manage interactive, online communities. The
interaction and feedback that are generated in the online forum can flow back into the CRM
system for analyses that can guide decisions on improving the overall customer experience.
You can facilitate the growth of a strong customer community by providing online forums for a
variety of topics of interest to your customers, including:
- Best practices. Encourage customers to share tips, tricks, success stories, and ideas, etc.
- Ideas and voting. You and your customers can share ideas on the future of your products and
services. Providing the opportunity for customers to vote on ideas is an excellent way to get
feedback, drum up participation, and help customers feel invested in your company"s future.
- User groups. You can set up local user groups and provide an online forum for communication
and planning among the local members. The power of the community is growing every
day. Using an on-demand solution to help you build stronger relations with your various
stakeholders is an easy way to harness that power to benefit your business.
CASE STUDY:
Successforce.com Web Site Provides Dynamic Forum for Customers to Interact with
Salesforce.com"and Each Other
As the world leader in on-demand CRM, salesforce.com knows a thing or two about building
lasting relationships with its customers. In addition to the expertise of salesforce.com"s in-house
experts, there is a wealth of knowledge in the customer community that Salesforce administrators
and users are eager to tap into. Salesforce.com"s popular Successforce.com Web site is a dynamic
forum in which customers share best practices, tips, and networking opportunities and access topquality
content contributed by product managers, and implementation experts.
Successforce.com message boards provide a variety of real-world perspectives in answer to
customers" burning questions. Written by salesforce.com product managers, the blogs provide a
forum for learning about the latest best-practice ideas and product developments. By encouraging
readers to post comments and questions, the blogs have become interactive conversations that
benefit everyone.
The site"s innovative IdeaExchange, built using the Salesforce Ideas application, allows customers
to post feature requests or entirely new product concepts that they"d like to see developed by
salesforce.com or by a partner or developer. Other customers can comment and vote on the
ideas, with the most popular ideas rising to the top. Salesforce.com product managers actively
monitor the IdeaExchange, offering insight and soliciting feedback on development projects. The
IdeaExchange is bringing democracy to product development and giving customers a greater"and
more public"voice in the future of the Salesforce product.
"Salesforce users are
so generous when it
comes to sharing info
and helping one
another succeed."
"David Resnick
VP of Sales & Marketing
TFC, Inc
Conclusion
No matter how large or small your company, these eight CRM essentials help you understand what
successful CRM looks like. By considering these eight essentials in all stages of your project"from
selecting a vendor to planning your implementation to tuning your solution and processes"you
can enjoy the same level of success that tens of thousands of companies have already experienced
with on-demand CRM.
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company"s
Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications is redefining success for sales force automation,
customer service and support, marketing automation, and partner relationship management.
To try on-demand CRM free for 30 days, go to: www.salesforce.com/freetrial.
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