##CONTINUE##
Vendor panels at industry conferences can often slip all too easily into shameless - and unfettered - product plugging by the main sponsors of the event. But this week's Gartner CRM Summit attempted to put a new spin on the format by inviting its platinum sponsors – Salesforce.com, Microsoft and Sword Ciboodle – to test their views of major industry topics and issues against the consensus opinion of Gartner analysts.
The results were a revealing disclosure how many differing opinions about the state of the market there are among the vendors – and how far removed they are on occasion from the analyst market-makers and thought leaders.
The vendors participants were: Brad Wilson, general manager at Microsoft Dynamics CRM (BW), Martin Woodson, vice president strategy, EMEA at Salesforce.com (MW), and Steven Thurlow, chief technology officer at Sword Ciboodle. Each was asked to address a particular question posed by Gartner and to score their results accordingly.
Gartner: Over the past 10 years what percentage of organisations have measured the ROI from CRM?
ST: 20%. People have tried to measure CRM but a lot of people have felt that they had to invest in it and, as such, targeted ROI has been hard to measure.
MW: 30%. One of the reasons the figure is so low is that people have spent so much time struggling with the basics of implementing CRM that we have had a hard time just getting to the point of measuring ROI. So why do people still invest in CRM? Recent research has seen increasing optimism about the chances of success for CRM. The history has been pretty bleak but there is now evidence from several decades of customers trying out there and people are getting more confident.
BW: 30%. A problem is that a lot of people who are measuring ROI don't actually have a base line. Even among my own customers, people try to measure results but don't know where they were to start with.
Gartner consensus: 24%
Gartner: What has been the most challenging of Gartner's eight building blocks for CRM – vision, strategy, customer experience, organisational change, organisational processes, data, technology and metrics?
BW: Data. Most firms have disparate sources of information so trying to get a coherent view of the customer experience has been practically impossible. Unless you have a clear view of information, then that's difficult to achieve. You can't achieve your strategy or vision if you can't get your arms around what you have.
MW: Customer experience. All the other building blocks stack up to that. We are seeing a move now from technology enabled CRM where we spent 90% of our time getting it to work. Now, with cloud computing, you put 90% of the effort into revising the processes and the information to get a superior customer experience. We leave the technology piece to third party specialists.
ST: Processes. People have talked a good game about customer experience and have spent 'gazillions' on technology, but when the rubber hits the road, their processes just aren't very good. Organisations have invested at each end, but it's in the middle where it all becomes concrete.
Gartner consensus: Organisational change
Gartner: Given that the percentage of CRM SaaS deployments in 2008 was 15%, what do you think that figure will be by 2020?
BW: 45%. We believe that SaaS is an important option for customers. We are working to deliver all our technology through both on demand and on premise models. Customers choose strategy first and the technology option second. There are lots of companies who will engage with SaaS. I'm not sure that in 12 years concerns about the control of customer data will evaporate. We think that on demand and on premise are the same thing, but you have a longer cable with one of them.
MW: 86.2! Actually, 10 years from now the right answer might be zero as we might have dropped the whole word software. One of the drivers of cloud computing will be the sheer number of CRM projects going on. CRM has been the domain of large organisations who had millions to afford it but we're seeing a big democratisation now. It's not only smaller firms who are adopting cloud computing; The Obama campaign, Starbucks and Dell have all gone direct to their customer base - with 'ideas sites' for the priorities in the first 100 days of the Obama presidency, or Starbucks for product ideas, or Dell for technology development. These aren't traditional CRM projects, they're the sort of things that didn't exist 10 years ago.
ST: 60%. I think you'll see a lot of process heading to the cloud. Every time you touch an organisation, you touch a process and a process assumes content. The cloud will become more federated.
Gartner consensus: 45%
Gartner: Open source CRM in 2008 was less than 1%; what will it be by 2020?
ST: 10%. It won't be a huge number. Organisations will want to take advantage of the innovation that vendors can offer. Open source will be present at the small end of the market and in sales force automation. In infrastucture terms, open source gives power to your developers. Once you get into applications, you're talking about processes and those are non-standard. Processes will change over time and you need a level of ownership.
MW: Less than 4%. Platform as a service is a better model than open source. The downside is that organisations see that open source is not about the licensing costs but about the maintenance costs. Once you get involved in the open source model, you need a stable of developers who can continue to adapt to needs over time. When organisations look at cloud computing, they see more benefits over time and much more predictability of costs.
BW: 5%. The core flaw for open source for business applications is that you need a supportable product with vendors behind it. People want to know that there is a repeatable escalation process for problems - open source often lacks that.
Gartner consensus: 8%
Gartner: What percentage of customer processes will not involve an employee by 2020?
BW: 90%. Ten years ago we walked into a bank if we wanted to get cash. No one does that now. With any self service system you have risk of fraud, but the costs you engineer out of your system outnumbers the risk of fraud. A lot more of the touchpoints to an organisation will be automated.
MW: Zero or 20. Any process that is customer facing involves employees somewhere. What you really mean is customer interactions as an alternative to human interactions, such as call centres or face-to-face meetings. If it's that, then maybe 20%, but it will vary enormously according to industry.
ST: 80%. Commodity processes should certainly be self-service but 'value' projects will involve employees. There will be a generational aspect. My eldest child will be 21 in 2020 and the self-service expectations that she will come with will be huge. Customers will choose to do self-service; it's not something they can be driven to for cost reaons.-----------------------------
BY Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor
Source：MYCUSTOMER.com
Copyright © 2009 Sift Media. All rights reserved.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment