Solvis Consulting, LLC

How Solvis can help with your CRM initiatives?

Don't know where to start with your next CRM initiative? Solvis can help your company in many ways, from educational programs to CRM strategies, and from software selection to the implementation of technologies, processes or change management.

The three main types of services we offer to help you with your CRM needs are: education, strategy and implementation. All three services are designed to provide quick implementation of your customer retention or acquisition initiatives.

If your organization is a small business in United States or Latin America, don't worry, we have different versions and options of these services based on your budget. At Solvis we have experience working with small companies, enterprises and holdings, as many organizations are looking to integrate their CRM synergies with technology and processes.

CRM & Social Media Education

We offer 2 types of educational seminars where we can bring our CRM experts on-site.

2009 CRM Recomendations

During the past few weeks Jesus Hoyos wrote a series of posts about how to improve your CRM initiatives in the areas of marketing automation, campaign management, sales and customer service.You will find "call to action" recommendations that you can implement anytime during 2009.

1. Parte 1 - Marketing Automation: ¿Qué actividades de marketing automation debo hacer para conocer a mis clientes?
2. Parte 2 - Campaign Management: ¿Qué debo hacer para manejar el ciclo de relacionamiento del cliente?
3. Parte 3 - Ventas: ¿Qué actividades y tácticas puedo hacer para mejorar el ciclo de ventas?
4. Parte 4 - Servicio al Cliente - ¿Que puedo mejorar en el área de servicio al cliente?

CRM Vendor Selection Process (SaaS vs OnPremise)

Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, SugarCRM, Salesforce.com, Aplicor and many other CRM packages now offer multiple options of CRM software to choose from. You have single-tenancy vs multi-tenancy, open-source, and SaaS vs OnPremise options. Within each vendor you have different options regarding modules and functionality. The good news is that you have choices based on your requirements, needs, priorities, IT policies and budget.

We at Solvis can help you decide which CRM vendor (software package or service) you need. We have a Software Selection Methodology that looks into processes and functionality that will help your business (small or large) select the proper software. Our methodology offers quick steps to make decisions. We can start with a short or large list of vendors, and we can offer proof-of-concepts and pilot programs for your implementation.

No matter what your software needs are, we can help your business select any CRM vendor: operational, analytical, collaborative and interactive - from call center to marketing automation and from SFA to customer service under any model: SaaS or OnPremise.

Our methodology includes the following steps:

1. Gather Requirements and Functionality
2. Identify Key Decision Criteria
3. Determine Weighting
4. Prepare and Send Out RFI
5. Refine Process Flows, Scenarios and Functionality
6. Conduct Vendor Demos
7. Complete Scorecards
8. Perform Reference Checks (Due Diligence)
9. Perform Gap Analysis
10. Conduct Vendor or Reference Site Visits
11. Evaluate and Select Vendor
12. Refine Business Case
13. Develop Proof-of-Concept
14. Develop Pilot

Depending of your business needs, some of the above steps are optional. We can also work with your software or implementation vendor in developing the proof-of-concept and pilot (quick win), before any major implementation. Time frames also depends on your business needs, but we can help you select software solutions from 5 to 8 weeks, or, we can just help you make a decision if you already have a short list of vendors.

Note: we have templates, tools and related documentation to facilitate a smooth selection process for all 14 steps of our methodology,

For more information contact us.

José Corona - Guest Author, Mundo Contact Blog

José Corona, our Mexico Office Director, is a contributing author at the Mundo-Contact 2.0 Blog. Jose writes about his customer service experiences and analytical CRM among other CRM topics. You can find his posts (in Spanish) here.

Suggested readings from Jose:

1. ¿Conoce usted al recurso más valioso de su empresa?

2. Buena experiencia de compra por Internet en Mexicana

3. Centros de Contacto IP - Contactos sin fronteras

4. El Modelo de Kano - La importancia de la capacidad de Innovación

5. Taller de minería de datos de Gordon Linoff – Segmentación por Comportamiento

What is CRM?

Check out this presentation - What is CRM?

What Is CRM ?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sales marketing)

Two CRM definitions ...

Customer Relationship Cycle

Customer Relationship cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service. There are five distinct steps: acquisition, maintain, maximize, loyalty and retain. This means getting a potential customer's attention, teaching them what you have to offer, turning them into a paying customer, and then keeping them as a loyal customer whose satisfaction with the product or service urges other customers to join the cycle.

Customer Life Cycle

This term is often confused with the Relationship cycle, Customer Life Cycle is the natural life cycle of a person that based on the life’s experiences and major events. This person will purchase products and services from your company based on likes and needs for your products and services.

4 Types of CRM ...

In the late 1990s, the Meta Group, now part of Gartner, came up with the definition of the CRM Ecosystem. This is our take based on the latest CRM 2.0 developments.

Operational CRM

Operational CRM is the combination of applications & processes that manage customer transactions such as campaigns, sales, order entry, customer service, warranties, collections & post-sales, among many others. Operational CRM provides support to "front office" business processes, e.g. to sales, marketing and service staff. Interactions with customers are generally stored in customers' contact histories, and staff can retrieve customer information as necessary.

The contact history provides staff members with immediate access to important information on the customer (products owned, prior support calls etc.), eliminating the need to individually obtain this information directly from the customer. Consequently, many call centers use some form of CRM software.

Analytical CRM

Analytical CRM is the combination of applications & processes that help understand customer trends, metrics and behavior using data modeling, data mining, data quality, and marketing automation techniques. Analytical CRM analyzes customer data for a variety of purposes:

1. Designing and executing targeted marketing campaigns
2. Designing and executing campaigns, e.g. customer acquisition, cross-selling, up-selling
3. Analyzing customer behavior in order to make decisions relating to products and services (e.g. pricing, product development)
4. Management decisions (e.g. financial forecasting and customer profitability analysis)
5. Analytical CRM generally makes heavy use of data mining.

Interactive CRM

Interactive CRM is the combination of applications & processes that manage customer interactions via the website, call center, email, offices, events, direct mail, SMS & account statements, among others. Interactive CRM covers aspects of a company's dealings with customers that are handled by various departments within a company, such as sales, technical support and marketing. Staff members within the departments can share information collected when interacting with customers.

Collaborative CRM

Collaborative CRM is the combination of applications & processes that help collaborate and promote a dialogue between the brand and the customer to help with product innovation, viral marketing & word-of-mount using blogs, microblogging, social networks (public & private), social bookmarketing, among other social media toolsets (user generated content, RSS, comments, ideas, videos, photos, tagging, etc.

Aplicor Presented Product of the Year Award by CIS Magazine

Aplicor Presented Product of the Year Award by CIS Magazine —

Aplicor, Inc., a global software provider of on-demand CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software as a service (SaaS) business solutions, was presented the Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation's Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM since 1982.

Congratulations to our friends at Aplicor!

The Best CRM Blogs of 2008 - Inside CRM

We recommend that during the 2009 you follow these 20 blogs selected by InsideCRM - The Best CRM Blogs of 2008 - Inside CRM.

There are 4 in particular that we follow here at Solvis:

1. PGreenblog and CRM 2.0: The Conversation, Paul Greenberg
2. Brent’s Social CRM Blog, Brent Leary
3. Social Customer Manifesto, Chris Carfi
4. CRM Mastery Blog, Jim Berkowitz

And for the latest about CRM in Latin America read Jesus Hoyos' blog - CRM en Latinoamerica.

You can also get the latest CRM's RSS feeds in both Spanish and English - CRM Universe.

The New B2C model: Social Networking and CRM

The other day I was cleaning up my emails in Outlook and moving some newsletters subscriptions to my Gmail account. During this process I was very surprise that many companies (some of them CRM vendors) do not have the basic functionality to change my email or profile in their email or CRM systems. I had to unsubscribe my old email and then subscribe my new email, and in a few occasions I had to delete my customer profile completely and then create a new one. In both scenarios these companies are loosing important data that the customer can update and they lost the opportunity to know more about me.

I wish they had some sort of OpenID standard or were using Facebook Connect to update my basic information. In my CRM blog about Latin America I wrote a few times --- Spanish content: Mi visita a Salesforce.com en México & CRM en el 2008 y el 2009... Mis Observaciones --- about the use of Salesforce.com and Facebook apps to do just this... where the user can use his or hers Internet identity to manage interactions and transactions with companies. Take for example the application from Startbucks Idea in Facebook and how users can share ideas using the "share this" option within Facebook.

Now, let's assume you are a financial institution --- you write a simple Facebook app in Salesforce.com to calculate different financial options and capture important data to pre-qualify the customer. All of these can be done within Facebook. Helping you collect the proper data and even measure word-of-mouth metrics based on the number of friends and referrals. And now you can extend this with the Facebook Connect functionality... Get the idea? This is true Social CRM ... this is a new B2C model... via social networking we should be able to better interact with customers in a collaborative way. I think this is the future of CRM... all in the cloud. Of course, there will be data portability issues and data privacy hurdles to overcome... but the consumers will decide where are we going with all of this SOCIAL CRM trend.

After my frustration changing my profile and emails, and reading more about Salesforce.com Sites for Facebook and the release of Facebook Connect, I see this trend becoming a reality. Tim O'Reilly mentions this trend on his recent interview with Robert Scobleizer. Tim mentions the fusion of social networking and CRM apps - where the user should manage his or her data... and many CRM systems depend on others users to manage the data. Let the consumer manage his or her data. See the interview below. Tim's comments about CRM are at the very end of the interview.

I see a race in 2009 for all CRM apps to get into the social networking bandwagon. Most of the major vendors already started the race. I see CRM vendors integrating Facebook Connect, Twitter, Comments from blogs and many other 2.0 technologies into their apps. Multi-Channel interactions and transactions will need to include 2.0 technolgies... it is no longer chat, email, phone and mail....

By Jesus Hoyos