Having a successful deployment of CRM — customer relationship management — software depends less on what technology you're using than on whether you really know your own business processes.

The idea of CRM was a magnificent leap forward in business thinking ten years ago. It's a beautiful, well-balanced and thoughtful way to meld the mundane daily ritual of call handling with an overall business strategy that works for the organization as a whole. CRM is a way of recognizing that what happens in a call center matters to the rest of the company, because customers matter. The C in CRM, after all, is about customers.

Not to be too glib, but customers don't want to have a relationship with you. They want to have a series of successful transactions, nothing more. The idea of customer loyalty is vastly overstated. A call center contributes to the corporate good to the extent that it creates an environment where most of the inevitable interactions go smoothly, or are turned from poor to good experiences on the part of the customer. While forward thinking call center managers are beginning to realize this, and harness tools used by the rest of the business to further their corporate objectives, many still remain mired in old-style thinking about what to measure and how to define success.

And that's where "Management," the M in CRM, comes in. If your idea of CRM consists of putting customer data on an agent's desktop — and doesn't go any farther — then you are mismanaging that relationship. CRM's transcendent beauty and promise is in the way it turns everything a company knows about a customer into a piece of leverage to get that customer to buy more, and to be happier about doing it.

The power of the call center as a business tool lies in its proximity to the customer's point of decision. An uninformed call center agent trying to help a customer is like a parking lot attendant who doesn't remember where he parked your car. What good is he? He can apologize for not knowing, but that doesn't really get you on your way, does it?

If you are one of the decisionmakers involved in the selection of the proper CRM tool for your business, instead of starting your search by an analysis of the technologies and features available to you in the software marketplace, start by looking at the way information passes among the constituents in your own company. What departments collaborate in the formation of a strategy for dealing with customers? Who has a vested interest in knowing something about the results of customer interactions? How is that information formatted, and what parts of it are meaningful?

Knowing the answers to these questions in advance — essentially knowing how your business operates — allows you to start at the end point of the process and know what you expect your CRM tools to do for you.

These are the four things you are going to want your CRM systems to help you do:

1. Track and report on the particulars of each customer interaction. Not necessarily the raw activity data (though that's part of it) — but real CRM power that comes from the ability to integrate data about outcome and value. What did that person buy? How does it relate to what else you are offering? Were there cross-sell opportunities that could have been leveraged? Is the customer tracking positively over time in terms of value, or negatively? Are we as a company responding effectively to his or her changing needs? Are we anticipating those needs, or reacting to them? (In fact, there is a whole separate but intimately related sector of the call center software marketplace called analytics that takes a multidimensional look at what's going on with customer activity and applies it across the corporate spectrum. Many people believe that analytics is true CRM software as implemented by people outside the call center. We'll be looking at analytics in an upcoming issue.)

2. Act as a front-end data gathering tool for any business processes that face the customer — things like order entry, billing, fulfillment tracking and service requests.

3. Tell you how agents' performance measures up against internal benchmarks and projections.

4. Formalize the workflow and business processes needed to effectively replicate good practices and stamp out bad ones within your center. Fulfilling these four functions is a tall order for any tool or suite of tools. It may be impossible in your specific circumstances to find a perfect match between vendor offerings and what your perfectworld scenario would look like.

The products we describe below all impact these four areas to a greater or lesser degree. Which tool is right for you will depend on the size of your company and your implementation; the degree to which your center is already integrated into other corporate systems; the degree of collaboration among critical departments like marketing, IT, sales and service; and, of course, your budget.

But one thing is certain: if you have a clear view of what your expectations are, of what your desired outcome will be, focusing on measurable results in the four areas we mentioned above, you will have a much more satisfying and rewarding CRM deployment experience. Now on to the tools.

ASTUTE SOLUTIONS

As suites get larger and more feature- packed, they tend to become less describable as pure "CRM" tools, and more as all-purpose tools.

Astute Solutions (Columbus, OH), for example, has a suite that nominally does what CRM is supposed to do — manage the collision between call data and customer data at the agent desktop — but does it in a way that brings in a lot of additional functionality.

The core of the tool is Astute's Web-based ePowerCenter, which lets call center agents view, manage, and process all interactions through a single interface. The software sports highly configurable reporting features that enables all parts of the organization, including departments outside your call center, to benefit from the information being collected in real time.

GENTICITY

So much of what we talk about in CRM is really about gathering data from different streams, commingling it and formatting it in the most meaningful way for the person who needs it.

This is one of the areas where Genticity's (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada) Customer1 stands out. This tool, more often considered as a customer service and support tool than a full-fledged CRM application, shows how the lines really are becoming more blurred about what constitutes CRM these days. Customer1 contains within it a powerful Web-based Reporting Matrix that transforms raw operational data from relational and OLAP data sources into highly enriched and interactive information. The software brings together, in one integrated product, all the key business intelligence capabilities required by the broadest range of users in the call center.

Here, too, we are blurring the lines not just between tools dedicated to sales or service, but between analytics tools that are used within the center and those that mimic business intelligence apps prevalent outside the center.

KANA

Only a few months ago, Kana (Menlo Park, CA) enhanced one of the key pieces of its suite, Kana Response, e-mail management software.

Kana Response pulls together customer information in real time from any data source, including Kana's knowledge base tool, Kana IQ. The latest version of Kana Response also includes increased security layers and agent management and monitoring tools.

NETSUITE

NetSuite (San Mateo, CA) is one of a growing number of companies that are trying to fill the demand for lower-cost, hosted CRM software.

NetSuite makes the case that what's missing from other ondemand CRM tools (including some of the really big names in the industry) is information about what the customer actually purchased in the past.

NetSuite gets it right in understanding that an integrated view of the customer must include sales information as well as customer buying histories. And that ultimately CRM tools ultimately exist to benefit not call centers, but rather a company's customers.

One nice feature that we found in NetSuite's tool is a set of dashboards that present info on key performance indicators — in real time. NetSuite's NetSuite CRM+ software lets you set up the business indicators that are critical in your circumstances, including those have to do with leads, sales and commissions.

ORACLE + SIEBEL

The combination of Oracle (Redwood Shores, CA) and newly acquired Siebel Systems (San Mateo, CA) is a powerful one in the CRM industry. Siebel was, and still is, the market share leader in CRM software. Siebel, a 12-year-old developer of CRM software founded by a former Oracle executive, Tom Siebel, will likely become part of Oracle at the beginning of next year.

Oracle's acquisition of Siebel comes less than a year after the company purchased another competitor, PeopleSoft.

Like PeopleSoft, Siebel was able to introduce a CRM suite as the result of an acquisition of a developer of customer support software in the late 1990s. What initially distinguished customer support software from CRM software was that CRM software enabled customer support, customer service and sales reps to view information about customers in a variety of contexts. Customer support software, by contrast, only allowed a specific group of call center agents, namely support reps, to view customers' support requests.

CRM software expanded access to customers' support requests to service and sales reps, so that they, too, would be aware of any issues customers had encountered. By being able to consult this information in advance of communicating with customers, support, service and sales operations would all be able to gauge whether they could effectively up- or cross-sell customers on other products and services, including those that would minimize customers' need for support.

In the past eight years, though, CRM software has increasingly become embedded within tools that call center agents use to communicate with customers. The idea of CRM as a standalone product category is now much less meaningful to call centers than it was in the late 1990s. Rather than focusing on the consolidation of information they possess about customers, today's call centers seek to understand and improve customers' perceptions of the companies they represent.

By buying Siebel, Oracle forces us to recognize a truth that's potentially discomforting for vendors and call centers alike: that CRM properly belongs in the realm of business intelligence sectors. It has nothing to do with call handling or call control.

So where are Siebel and Oracle they going together? One hint is the comprehensive strategy, discussed by Siebel at a recent user conference. There Siebel talked about a Customer Adaptive Architecture that encompasses all of Siebel products and services.

Siebel argues that current CRM suites (presumably including Siebel's own) typically do not provide comparable benefits to the vast community of knowledge workers. Whether they're conscious of it, when knowledge workers serve customers, they rapidly conduct a situational analysis based on a broad set of disparate data and then immediately act on that analysis as they assist customers. The data often comes from multiple areas; it includes both structured sources such as databases and document repositories and unstructured information such as Web sites. Siebel says that its Customer Adaptive Solutions will distill insight and knowledge from this data and present prioritized, recommended and immediately actionable choices.

The natural outgrowth of that kind of thinking leads us squarely to the combination of Oracle, with its tight grip on business apps that control structured, organized and strategic information, with Siebel, which concentrates on activity-based information that originates with the customer directly.

STAYINFRONT

One area in which niche vendors have found a promising market has been to build customized CRM-style applications for vertical industries. Case in point: Stayin- Front (Fairfield, NJ), which recently unveiled CRM software specifically aimed at the pharmaceutical sector.

Although StayinFront has focused on life sciences as one of its main vertical markets (with around 70 pharmaceutical companies using its tools), StayinFront's CRM suite is firmly rooted in call center basics. StayinFront's Stayin- Front Contact Center add-in software that lets call centers route calls and on-line communication, as well as generate screen pops.

One nice aspect of having their tool planted in the life sciences industry is the emphasis on security that lends it. The latest version of StayinFront's suite, StayinFront CRM 9.3, locks down sensitive data so that it can't be printed, exported, used in a mail merge document or copied.

TERADATA

This entry into the CRM market comes from Teradata (Dayton, OH), a division of NCR, and it ventures farther towards what we now consider to be analytics than toward old-style customer management.

Teradata Relationship Manager Version 6 is browser-based for ease of use and architected to take full advantage of the enterprise intelligence capabilities of Teradata's data warehousing software.

Teradata Relationship Manager emphasizes analysis and market planning rather than interaction management. The software sports a role-based interface that provides multiple views of the data, analysis, campaigns, workflow, metrics and other dimensions of the marketing process. These views reflect the roles of the marketing and campaign manager and developer and marketing analyst. Teradata's suite is among the first in the CRM niche to come out swinging with the idea that customer and call center data is most useful when its application in the context of marketing opportunities.