A mere five years ago, customer relationship management (CRM) was the new kid on the block. But strip away the jargon and you will find that the basic principles behind CRM have been around for decades.
Quite simply the goal of CRM is to attract, serve and retain your 'best' - most profitable - customers, and to do this through value-adding partnerships so that both you and your customers benefit.
This goal is well understood, and most organisations have implemented some form of CRM, typically in the form of sales force automation or in the call centre environment.
There is no question that correctly deployed, CRM can be a value-driving tool, and in principle, sales forces want to embrace it. However, many salesforce automation projects fail to impress and according to Gartner Group, up to 60 per cent of CRM implementations fail and a third of all CRM systems become inactive within one year.
CRM projects have, in general, struggled with two issues. First, while applications contain a wealth of knowledge for sales or field service professionals, they need to be back at the office to access it.
The second issue is that most CRM systems rely on customer-facing users creating this knowledge in the first place - many systems fizzle out when users fail to do this, because it is too difficult, too inconvenient, or delivers minimal benefit to the users.
PA is finding that the use of mobile technology to record and deliver that valuable knowledge - technology that is accessible today - can improve the effectiveness of sales and field service teams and help make CRM a success.
PA's work with clients reveals five key success factors that can make the difference to effective CRM implementation:
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Meet the customer with an unobtrusive technology aid: imagine the salesperson with a ten-minute window of opportunity to influence a busy professional. The PDA is an unobtrusive tool in this environment (unlike a laptop computer) that delivers key information in a fast, effective format. This principle applies to virtually all sales situations, across all sectors, not just pressure environments.
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Deliver a single view of the customer to the value point: imagine account managers having an up-to-the-minute view on previous contact information, current status of orders, queries and complaints, relevant corporate news, just before or during a meeting with prospects or customers.
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Provide a real-time response to customer demand: imagine being able to schedule service visits in real-time as requests come in, and deliver to service managers the information they need to complete the call (such as previous issues, technical specifications, stock information), as well as minimising manual errors in the subsequent billing process - 'doorstep' job creation and completion.
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Open a new channel to your customers: by building the processes to support mobile working, why not open this new channel to customers? From targeted marketing to tracking of orders, deliveries and queries, more and more customers will be making use of mobile technology.
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Maximise the opportunity to build customer relationships: your people in the field should be given every opportunity to focus where they add most value - face-to-face meetings with customers. Mobile technology reduces the administration overhead and corresponding time delay and errors, and together with online access to the 'office' environment, will make your mobile work force more productive.
The past two years have seen an incredible growth in software and services to serve the growing mobile CRM market, as major vendors, such as Siebel, Onyx, PeopleSoft, SAP and FrontRange Solutions (formerly GoldMine), turn their attention to it. And this is not just good theory, it is being put into practice.
For example, Chubb Insurance, a home and health insurance provider, is rolling out mobile CRM to a select group of its brokers. The system provides access to data sheets, competitive information, customer profiles and more, all with the touch of a pen on the screen. Its colour and high-level graphics support also make it useful for running interactive presentations during a call.
In the UK, the focus is on delivering applications for the Palm and Compaq iPAQ/ Pocket PC PDAs. These applications are based on a combination of mini web-browsers enabling access to key customer knowledge, or synchronised views of information, which is carried with the mobile worker.
According to Datamonitor, the global mobile customer relationship management (mCRM) market will rise from US$ 75m in 2000 to US$ 118m in 2001 and US$ 1.7bn by 2005. By the end of 2001, North America will lead the global m-commerce space, accounting for 57 per cent of worldwide mCRM revenue, while the UK will represent 16 per cent, Germany 10 per cent and France 7 per cent.
Clearly, implementing mCRM is not easy - in fact it is probably harder than getting traditional CRM right. In addition to all the people and organisational change aspects of CRM, mCRM adds the complexity of supporting mobile devices, short battery lives, patchy network coverage, low bandwidth and so on.
Start with a small pilot, using a percentage of your mobile workers. By studying the way they work, determine what information would add most value at different points of their business process. Think also how you will measure success and what fallback options exist. Get it right, and the benefits to your business process can be enormous.
