Page 251 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Services Management

Notes 11.6.4 Opportunities in CRM

Earlier when service organisation’s large projects concentrated on Main Frames, ERP, MRP and
SCM systems, excessive customer orientation has changed focus to customers resulting in
emergence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. CRM helped the service
organisations in improving efficiency and hence, providing better services to customers. CRM
is now one of the main tools for surviving in the competitive market by focusing on customer
needs. To help achieve this, there were many CRM solutions that came out in market. Such
solutions included generic CRM solutions focused on sales and services to industry specific
solutions that embedded the best practices for those industries. Such solutions helped software
developers and software vendors in generating large revenues in terms of sales and
implementation of such applications.
Now most of the large organisations have opted, implemented and more or less stabilized one
or another application with its core and customized CRM functionality. This article explores
further opportunities that are available in CRM Market.
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI): Once a CRM solution is implemented, the Organization
needs to focus on integrating it with other applications. There are diverse applications and
technologies used in an organisation that need to interact with each other. Integrating such
applications will help in sharing business critical data and help improve in better business
efficiency by reducing the time that is required to spend on gathering and sharing such
information. This brings out the opportunity of Application to Application (A2A) and Business
to Business (B2B) integration using EAI strategies like Point to Point, Hub and Spoke and
Distributed Messaging.
Upgrade: There are many large organisations that have heavily customised CRM solutions
which they have continued using for years. There are new/latest versions of such applications
available. As of now there are many CRM solution providers who are supporting old versions
of their application, but how long is a question. Once those organisations decide to upgrade or
move to later/latest versions of the application, this will open up new market.

Hosted Solutions: There are many small organisations that neither have capacity nor
infrastructure to buy and implement CRM solution. Such small organisations will prefer to opt
for hosted solutions and pay based on the usage.
Redesign the wheel instead of reinventing it: new technology architecture changes like Service
Oriented Architecture is requiring redesigning of the CRM solution architecture. This has opened
up new market for software vendors and system integrators.
Small and Medium Enterprise (SME): Although CRM solutions have been implemented by most
of the large organisations, SME segment is still vastly open and lot of potential to be capitalised.
11.6.5 Data Mining and Technology

Data mining is the process of analysing data from different perspectives and summarising it
into useful information – information that can be used to increase revenue, cuts costs, or both.
It is sometimes called data or knowledge discovery. Data mining software allows users to
analyse data from many different dimensions or angles, categorize it, and summaries the
relationships identified. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or
patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases.

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