Best Practices Series

LiveOps
PAGE 3 FIND OUT WHY SALESFORCE.COM IS USING LIVEOPS CONTACT CENTER IN THE CLOUD FOR BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE

Getting Value From

Cloud Computing
in CRM

Birst
PAGE 5 LET YOUR CRM ANALYSIS AND REPORTING SOAR The Compelling Benefits of CloudBased Business Intelligence

NOW!

Oracle
PAGE 6 ALL SAAS IS NOT CREATED EQUAL

Informatica
PAGE 7 HOW TO AVOID A CLOUD DATA DISASTER

Produced by: CRM Media

January 2010

CRM magazine Best Practices Series:

Getting Value From

Cloud Computing in CRM

NOW! (and later!)

When we came up with the idea for this Best Practices topic, we expected many participating software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to write about rapid deployments of tactical, non-IT intensive solutions. This is still the case, but their interests are much larger in scope. These vendors want people to know that their SaaS solutions have moved into a different phase of maturity and, as a result, are making their way into more large enterprises. It makes sense that, as valuable and affordable technology matures, adoption at all levels will increase. However, the SaaS delivery model is starting to experience problems similar to onpremises solutions when it comes to strategic decision-making. Some of the problems, though, may not be due to technological complications. The broad choice of offerings from SaaS providers in the CRM space and their ease of deployment and functionality encourage autonomous department managers to sample and subscribe to solutions that fit their needs extremely well. Many decision makers, though, dont necessarily consider their counterparts on other floors in their building. This situation probably wasnt much of an issue when most of the companies migrating to subscription-based cloud solutions tended to be small and the implementations more visible. But, as these offerings find homes in larger organizations, they

may not be on everyones radar screens. This could create a problem that CRM systems were originally supposed to solveinformation silos and decentralized access to customer information. To be sure, cloud computing truly empowers business managers to choose which solutions to employ and how to manage them, without worrying about the deployment process. This frees them from installation headaches and any ensuing conflicts with their IT department. As my own vice president of IT correctly barked at me once, Your tweak is my week. Of course, from my point of view, my tweak is worth his week. Needless to say, he doesnt see it this way. His default response is still stuck on no. The conflict continues, but I have a much clearer vision of what will help me succeed, without total reliance on IT input. Still, as adoption of SaaS solutions become more widespread, integration and customization challenges, especially at larger companies, exist. So, while end runs around the IT department felt great while they lasted, weve reached a point where its time to move on together. Bob Fernekees VP/Group Publisher CRM Media Information Today, Inc.

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January 2010

Using Contact Center in the Cloud to Run a Global Customer Support Organization that Delivers the Best Customer Service Experience
SEARCHING FOR A NEW CONTACT CENTER PLATFORM

Salesforce.com

Salesforce.com has helped make cloud computing a trusted way for companies to access worldclass enterprise software functionality. Today, over 63,200 businesses have embraced this low cost, low-risk approach to software delivery and are reaping the benefits of CRM through world-class applications like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.
As the company continued to enjoy growth, the customer support organization needed better visibility across all their global support centers. In addition, the companys existing contact center technology wasnt as scalable as it needed it to be, which impacted customer service levels. To optimize the customer experience, they deployed the LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform across all locations. Delivering an exceptional customer experience is central to salesforce.coms value proposition, and as the company grew to over US $1billion in revenue, it was critical to ensure that customers could quickly access the best agent to meet their needs. The global deployment of customer

support centers spanning Japan, Australia, Europe, and North America allowed salesforce.com to place agents strategically around the world to follow the sun with their global clients, ensuring someone is always available to take customer calls. Of course, geographically distributed customer support centers and a fastgrowing customer base presented additional demands on infrastructure. Salesforce.com wanted to ensure they were making the best use of expert resources to meet individual customer needs. They wanted a robust, integrated, skills-based routing capability across all support locations, so calls would reach the best agent right away. At the time, the various support center locations also used different contact center technology, which resulted in other challenges. We needed to ensure that our team and infrastructure were scaling to meet our growing customer needs in order to deliver exceptional customer service, explains Krista Anderson, SVP Global Customer Support at salesforce.com. We needed a vendor with redundant infrastructure that was always on. In addition, we wanted to further enhance our real-time global visibility and rolebased access to information capabilities that would enable us to drive the best customer experience.

Salesforce.com began looking for a new contact center platform that would span all current geographic locations, allow for growth into new locations and deliver the reliability and scalability to support continued expansion. We also wanted a way to manage these global resources as a single, unified customer support center. We wanted to seamlessly route complex customer calls to the agent with the best skill set to resolve them, irrespective of location, explains Anderson. Our goal was to get customers to the right agent who could resolve their issues on the first call. The platform also had to support nine different languages with the capability to quickly ramp new languages as salesforce.com grows into new markets. After researching their options, salesforce.com chose to deploy the LiveOps On-Demand Contact Center Platform across all their global customer support centers. We liked the sophisticated functionality and high reliability of the LiveOps solution, explains Anderson. In particular, we were impressed by the integration it provided with the Service Cloud, salesforce.coms game-changing customer service application.

KEY BENEFITS
High reliability and scalability across all contact center locations Ability to manage geographically distributed agent teams as a single, integrated customer support center Reduction in average call handling time enabled by CTI Improved first-call resolution rates enabled by skills-based routing that automatically routes each call to the best available agent 100% inbound call recording for more effective quality monitoring

January 2010

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Today, salesforce.com considers having a contact center in the cloud essential to providing great customer support. Weve been extremely pleased with the LiveOps platform. All of our mission-critical infrastructure is performing to our high standards enabling salesforce.com to provide high-quality, responsive customer service across all of our customer support centers. Krista Anderson SVP, Global Customer Support salesforce.com

And because LiveOps software runs in the cloud, it can be accessed by users anywhere in the world so all of our geographically distributed customer support centers could work using a single platform. Equally important, the LiveOps platform was able to scale with the business, eliminating the need to worry about infrastructure capacity in the future. It could also deliver sophisticated functionality that supports: Global skills-based routing, which improves first call resolution rates by automatically routing calls to the best available agent for each customer regardless of their physical location and optimizing the customer experience Real-time visibility into activities, processes, agents, and calls across all customer support centers through a comprehensive, customizable dashboard 100% inbound call recording across all locations (and instant access to playbacks directly from within salesforce.coms Service Cloud) The ability to stay ahead of business requirements for example, enabling management to move bundles of calls from one center to another and make administrative changes on the fly

THE BENEFITS OF A UNIFIED NETWORK OF CUSTOMER SUPPORT CENTERS

The LiveOps platform can handle salesforce.coms complex call routing scenarios and allows business operations people to make routing changes on the fly using administrative tools. This allows us

to stay ahead of our business needs, explains Anderson. For example, if we have call overflow in one customer support center, the LiveOps platform enables us to send those calls to another center thats being underutilized. The platform also enables salesforce.com to automatically detect and route calls from customers in salesforce.coms premier service program to their premier support agents. Armed with greater insight into calls and agent performance, salesforce.com has been able to substantially improve key performance metrics for its customer support centers. Weve also received positive feedback from our customers because we now address them personally, and proactively ask about open tickets when they call. This is because caller ID information and screen pops immediately identify the caller and bring up the customer record in the Service Cloud. With LiveOps, weve significantly improved the quality of our customer experience consistently and across all locations, adds Anderson. Equally important, we have a solid contact center platform that will grow with the business.

Real-time Analytics Call Volumes & SLAs

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January 2010

Let Your CRM Analysis and Reporting Soar

The Compelling Benefits of Cloud-Based Business Intelligence

In a difficult economy, smart CRM managers are pursuing every available opportunity to maximize performance and minimize costs. Business Intelligence solutionsused to analyze data, identify trends, and support business decisionscontinue to gain in popularity among companies of all sizes as they seek to optimize efficiency and effectiveness and gain a competitive edge. While large investments in conventional onpremise Business Intelligence solutions are impractical and unattractive to most businesses at this time, the allure of cloudbased business intelligence (BI) solutions has never been stronger.
CLOUD BI: ALL THE POWER AT A FRACTION OF THE COST

FASTER ROI

A faster time to value allows for a quicker return on investment. Cloud BI solutions offer quick deployment and easy changes. Unlike traditional BI implementation, which can take 12 to 18 months or longer, cloud BI solutions can typically be up and running in just a few weeks.
LOWER UP-FRONT COSTS

ongoing operational expense (OpEx) rather than a capital expense (CapEx). This makes these solutions particularly attractive in years, like this one, where CapEx budgets are under intense scrutiny.
CLOUD COLLABORATION

Cloud BI providers manage all of the back-end systems for their service as well as host their applications, so customers are spared the hardware and setup costs associated with having a BI solution deployed. There is no hardware to buy, no software servers to purchase and set up.
LOWER ONGOING COSTS

Cloud-based users can easily share data with others, both inside and outside the users organization. This makes it easy for users to share insight with remote offices, suppliers, field sales organizations, partners, and customers.
LOW RISK, HIGH REWARD

Cloud BI solutions, which are hosted by service providers and accessed by users over the Internet, offer all of the benefits of traditional BI solutions while substantially improving the economic bottom line. These on-demand solutions provide powerful and flexible business insight, but are faster, easier, and less costly than custom behind the firewall solutions. The business benefits of cloud BI are compelling and real. Relative to traditional business intelligence solutions, cloud BI solutions offer the following business benefits.
GET MORE ANSWERS TO MORE PEOPLE

Cloud BI vendors typically charge a subscription fee which provides an all-in cost for the right to use the application service, maintenance, and support. This subscription is usually based on the number of users who will interact with the system, the volume of data analyzed and a support plan. This pricing approach ensures that customers pay only for what they need, as they need it.
EASIER BUDGET APPROVAL

As a monthly subscription service, cloud solutions offer a low-risk opportunity to acquire business intelligence without high costs, onerous commitments, or high resource requirements. The rewards of greater business insight, improved efficiency, higher productivity and lower costs make this a winning strategy for businesses of all sizes.
WANT TO KNOW MORE? Get the full white paper here: www.birst.com/cloudBI

Cloud BI delivers Business Intelligence tools into the hands of those who can make the biggest impact. Conventional solutions tend to be expensive and IT resource intensive, limiting their availability to dedicated analysts who are spread thinly across the many business units that they serve. Cloud solutions are easier and less costly to deploy and require little special expertise to operate. As a result, they are more accessible to non-technical users throughout the organization.

Cloud solutions are paid for as subscriptions; their license cost is a monthly, predictable expense and not a large, up-front payment for licenses as with conventional software. Therefore, cloud solutions can be typically purchased as an

An executive dashboard with key reports and easy report filters.

January 2010

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ALL SAAS IS NOT CREATED EQUAL

No longer the new kid on the block, SaaS CRM has evolved into a mature software category. Yet unlike many other industries where products become more commoditized over time, the differences between SaaS CRM offerings have never been more pronounced. Given this fact, what are the best criteria on which to base a purchase of SaaS CRM? Here are five areas to consider: 1. Actionable Insight: A powerful transactional CRM platform is as critical in todays sales- and customerintensive environments as it ever was. But its embedded analytics that produce game-changing capabilities which enable organizations to drive increased revenues. Yes, nice looking charts are important, but they are not nearly as critical as is the ability to analyze and compare snapshots of information over time and easily drill into underlying data to pinpoint issues like sales pipeline bottlenecks. Evaluators of SaaS CRM should prioritize on those providers offering real-time and historic analytics within their core offering. 2. Productivity: One of the initial appeals of SaaS CRM was its ease of use, enabling sales teams to quickly adopt and benefit from using CRM. However, this is no longer a key differentiator. Prospective purchasers of SaaS CRM should therefore look at the breadth of productivity enhancing capabilities a solution provides. For example, sales representatives spend a disproportionate amount of their time prospecting, conducting their own marketing campaigns and building presentations. But do they have access to collaborative solutions that dramatically increase their efficiency and effectiveness in these areas? Can

they leverage an analytical dashboard that systemizes the process of determining price so they can optimally manage deals? And do these solutions free up their time for more selling? 3. Flexibility: Select vendors will preach that multi-tenant (i.e., shared) SaaS systems are the only feasible deployment option. Coincidentally its typically the only option they provide. And for many organizations, multitenant deployments do make the most sense. But what about those companies seeking the increased flexibility provided by single-tenant SaaS CRM, or a deployment at their premises, on their hardware, managed remotely? Evaluators of SaaS CRM should not only assess their current requirements, but should also evaluate their companys longer term needs to assure their best short-term decision is also their wisest long-term fit. In particular, they should consider a provider that delivers not just multiple ways to deploy SaaS CRM but also offers on premise CRM for the most transaction-intensive and demanding business processes. 4. Simplicity: Vendor consolidation continues to be an aspiration for organizations in general and their IT functions in particular. Why sign up with a provider who will unabashedly tell you that in order to benefit from CRM youll need to work with a loose and complex web of companies in order to gain a complete solution? Instead, why not benefit from the simplicity of working with a single vendor that provides more out-of-thebox capabilities? And when one does need to leverage a partner ecosystem, why not consider a company with a strategic network of closely affiliated

partners that offer pre-tested integrations, as opposed to a website catalog of vendors? More is not necessarily better. 5. Industry Capabilities: The majority of organizations in industries such as insurance, life sciences and wealth management, to name a few, have similar requirements. Yet because their needs differ widely from those of a typical company, they usually have to optimize a SaaS CRM solution from the ground up to meet their specific business process requirements. Instead, SaaS CRM evaluators should prioritize on those providers offering pre-built industry editions, with the majority of capabilities they require pre-built into the SaaS CRM system. This strategy significantly speeds deployments and lowers costs. In summary, while you may be tempted to make a purchase decision based on your companys short-term tactical requirements, you will need to live with a CRM system for many years. Therefore, consider your organizations long-term strategic imperatives as a foundation for your evaluation of SaaS CRM services.
ABOUT ORACLE Oracle Corporation (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the worlds leader in CRM with 5,000 CRM customers, 4.6 million CRM users, and 125 million self-service users. Our customers rely on Oracle customer relationship management, business intelligence, and customer data integration solutions to deliver dramatic improvements in identifying, acquiring, retaining, and serving their customers. With an unmatched range of products, industry expertise, and deployment options, Oracle is the right choice for CRM. For more information, please go to www.oracle.com/crm.

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January 2010

How to Avoid a Cloud Data Disaster

Cloud computing is proving to be a disruptive force when it comes to how organizations procure and manage enterprise software. The web has truly democratized who can try and buy business applications and line of business (LOB) managers have never felt more empowered to make technology purchasing decisions in many cases bypassing the IT organization altogether. But as Software as a Service (SaaS) application adoption grows and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) becomes viable for IT organizations, its apparent that many of the traditional barriers to onpremise software implementation success are no different in the Cloud. Do these issues sound familiar? Lack of integrated data across systems leads to information silos and multiple versions of the truth. Poor data quality leads to a low application adoption and limited ROI. With the attraction of faster deployments, low monthly subscription pricing, and the potential to not have to get in line for limited IT resources, how are you going to ensure that your Cloud strategy is a lightening rod for business improvement and not a data disaster waiting in the wings? Here are a few recommendations: 1. Dont Wait to Integrate. In many organizations, Cloud applications have proliferated departmentally and a plan to integrate data between them has been an afterthought, if considered at all. Develop your application and data integration strategy up front and ensure that it is tightly aligned with your overall plans for business process improvements and cost savings. 2. Make Data Quality a Top Priority. Because of the try before you buy aspect of the SaaS model, organizations are often in a rush to roll out these easy-to-use web-based applications. But the impact of garbage in, garbage out is even more detrimental to success in the Cloud. With no onpremise hardware to manage and maintain, the pay for what you use model means its never been easier to turn off an application if adoption is low. Just as a lack of data integration will lead to silos of data and multiple views of the truth, without timely, relevant, and trustworthy information, you can forget about any kind of return on your Cloud investments. 3. Get IT Involved Early. As Cloudapplications and platforms have matured, some of the traditional IT objections (security, performance, availability, integration, customization, etc.) are now simply questions that vendors should be able to answer with references and data center details without difficulty. At the same time, IT organizations must establish new criterion for SaaS/Cloud vendors as many of the historical RFP questions about technology standards and the like are less relevant when selecting the right SaaS/Cloud solution. 4. Think Big, Start Small. Develop a vision for Cloud computing, but avoid a big bang approach. Do an audit of your in-house systems and determine which areas can benefit the most from SaaS adoption, which core systems will continue to run on premise, and which groups have already embraced Cloudbased applications. Seek to establish standards and purchasing guidelines to avoid SaaS sprawl and ensure that departmental priorities, budgets, and skill sets are well understood. 5. Beware of Point Solutions. There is an exciting wave of innovation happening around Cloud computing and new companies are bringing fantastic new technologies to market every day. But especially in this economy, where startup funding can be particularly difficult, be sure to do your homework when it comes to the long-term viability of your SaaS/Cloud vendor and look for solutions that will grow with you as you move more and more computing to the Cloud. Whether youre considering software, platform, or infrastructure as a service, embracing Cloud computing can have a dramatic impact on your business in terms of cost-savings, resource allocation, agility and alignment. But in order to experience these benefits, companies of all sizes must have an overall data integration strategy in place.
Informatica Corporation is the worlds number one independent provider of data integration software. The Informatica Cloud delivers true SaaS integration applications for line of business managers, a powerful Cloud integration platform for developers and IT, and a track record of proven customer success. Dont wait to integrate get started today at www.InformaticaOnDemand.com.

January 2010

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SILVER SPONSOR
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Bob Fernekees,
Group Publisher 212-251-0608 x13 bfernekees@destinationcrm.com

Adrienne Snyder,
Eastern/Midwest Account Director 201-327-2773 adrienne@destinationcrm.com

Dennis Sullivan,
Western Account Director 800-248-8466 x538 dennis@destinationcrm.com

Produced by: CRM Media

A Division of Information Today, Inc.