Siebel's Steve Rogers suggests routes to CRM success
Millions of pounds have been spent on state-of-the-art CRM systems
and high-tech call centres yet many people feel that customer
service in UK businesses is still extremely poor.
Steve Rogers, UK managing director at Siebel, believes the problem
lies with the data. "Very few businesses have a single view of the
customer," he said.
In a mature organisation, customer data is dispersed across many
different systems. For instance, customer data could exist in
shipping systems, logistics and accounts. "Only recently have
executives started putting customers in the middle of their
businesses," said Rogers.
A single customer view does not equate to a single customer
database. "It is a mistake to put all the data in one place," said
Rogers. The database becomes large and unwieldy. Moreover, creating
a single customer database is incredibly difficult.
Rogers' answer is to set up a federated, loose partnership where
customer data is allowed to flow freely between IT systems tied
together with smart middleware. He said Siebel often acts as "agent
provocateur" by managing the business processes from the inception
of a marketing campaign right through to extracting cash from the
customer.
Siebel achieves this with its Uan (Universal Application Network)
middleware, which is based on XML to enable data to be shared
between applications. Rogers said, "With Uan, Siebel can reduce
integration costs by 50%." The Uan software is being extended
during 2003 and Rogers said it will include 250 business processes
by the end of the year.
But Uan is a stepping-stone as far as integration goes. Rogers
said, "Within five years we will have very few companies building
integration." Instead, he predicted that a new type of software
will emerge - "integration applications" that sit on top of
middleware.
Industry analysts often warn that CRM does not deliver business
value in terms of return on investment. Rogers does not dispute
this but he said the problem is down to businesses building their
own CRM solutions instead of buying packages.
"The vast majority of CRM is not delivered by packaged software,"
he said. When Siebel visits prospective users, Rogers said the CRM
business case it proposes is normally rejected at least once by the
board. "We do not sell any software today that does not have a
robust business case."
Still, the problem for users is measuring whether the CRM project
has delivered business value. "In the vast majority of cases, no
one specified the success and failure criteria," Rogers said. "No
rigour or metrics were applied to ensure key milestones had been
reached."
Rogers advised IT directors to invest in the IT backbone to support
CRM. But they also need to take a customer-centric view of the
business. "CIOs are pivotal in delivering the majority of short-and
medium-term business benefits." Taking this further, Rogers said IT
directors should be rated by the customer value they add to the
business.