The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Adam Carroll's album released a couple months ago, Lookin' Out The Screen Door:
Intelliworks, Inc., a vendor of CRM for higher education, has announced that Southern Methodist University, The Brookings Institution and University of Washington have all gone live on the Intelliworks CRM platform.
Frank R. Lloyd, Associate Dean, Executive Education SMU Cox School of Business, said they selected the system because "it was purpose-built for executive education programs, and it is being used by other top business school programs."
"It works and everybody else is doin' it." First Coffee's heard better reasons for choosing a software system, but believe me, I've heard a lot worse too.
In a single system, "we can communicate with people as they progress from prospect to registrant to participant and past-participant," says Lloyd. And in this case, "past-participant" means "alumni who will be supplicated for donations for the rest of his natural life."
Using Intelliworks CRM, the SMU team hopes to be able to offer better integrated customer service, marketing, and sales, university officials say. Some things they'd like to do -- or do better -- are to accept online payments securely, finely segment customers by various attributes and deliver targeted messaging, build sites for each program to provide greater interaction with customers and staff through discussion boards, faculty material postings, and online faculty-student interactions and manage sales leads and client relationships -- both inside and outside sales activities.
The left-wing "think tank" Brookings Institution's Adina Lord, Enrollments and Operations Manager said they're "delighted to implement iRM (Intelliworks Relationship Manager) at the Brookings Center for Executive Education."
IRM will "enhance our relationships with our current clients through its unified customer relationship management system, and will allow us to better track and manage new customer relationships."
Brookings selected Intelliworks because "their product is designed to meet the needs of executive education programs," specifically, iRM will "give us the chance to identify our best customers, manage our growing relationships with executives and deliver the right marketing to the right people. The enhanced reporting capabilities of the system will allow all of our staff to have easy access to data about our clients."
Burst Media has announced that Tacoda, Inc. has renewed its agreement to use a customized version of AdConductor, the company's complete ad management product, for its Tacoda Audience Networks, which bills itself as "the nation's largest behaviorally-driven online advertising network of quality Web sites for brand advertisers."
(Okay, sorry, I'm going to have to take this Adam Carroll CD off the player, spending way too much time listening and laughing than doing any actual work. This is why I can't have Bob Dylan or John Prine on while working either. Need something more work-friendly… Frank Sinatra or something jazzy like that… Sinatra's Come Fly With Me album, there we go. Let's get together after work, Adam.)
The agreement will enable Tacoda to "take advantage of numerous new features and upgrades in AdConductor such as integration with Tacoda's existing CRM and billing systems, as well as a unified order entry system that links directly to its customer resource management tools," according to Burst Media officials.
A private-label portal will serve as a dashboard that allows Tacoda publisher partners to control their overall online advertising business.
"For all our customers we try and serve as much as business consultants as we do technology providers, using our ten years of Internet advertising network experience. Our goal is to help them reengineer their processes with proven technology," says Harry Klein, Burst's COO.
Tacoda calls itself "the world's largest and most advanced behavioral targeting advertising network." Frankly I can't think of a larger or more advanced behavioral targeting advertising network, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that one.
Communications service providers: Want to get consumers to go for your bundled offerings of fixed and wireless phone, DSL broadband, and video services? Better pay attention to your CRM databases, among other things.
A new report by consulting firm Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, Inc. recommends that service providers who want to develop and deliver integrated products and services need to adhere to industry standards, cooperate with large developer and vendor communities, and form strategic partnerships with experts in core technologies such as seamless mobility.
They also need to "build a convergence customer data repository, with information from multiple CRM databases and network switches, to provide a single view of customer profitability and usage across different products," Diamond analysts found, adding that "service providers will also need a common Internet Protocol core network."
It's quite a challenge. Cable operators like Comcast and the Regional Bell Operating Companies see the convergence of these various services as an important source of growth, noted Hamilton Sekino, a partner in Diamond's telecom practice.
Sekino calculates that approximately $18 to $23 billion in enterprise value is in play as RBOCs and cable providers bundle services to compete for increased market share in the U.S.
"Profitably delivering bundled services -- the so-called triple and quadruple plays of various voice, data and video offerings -- will require that providers build significant new capabilities," Sekino contends. "It will take targeted marketing, customer-centric offerings, new organizational models, and technology innovation to be successful."
"A key question these companies must answer is, 'will customers go for it?'" Sekino said. "There isn't a monolithic market. Different consumer segments have far different attitudes about what they're willing to buy, from whom, and at what price. The answers will drive billions of dollars in investments."
And those are exactly the sort of answers well-done CRM, which is based on the premise that one size does not fit all, can provide, as the firm notes.
...And from the Another Story First Coffee Would Love To Be Reporting On Location department, Ryder Systems, a European provider of bill management for fixed and mobile operators, has been awarded a contract by Ireland's eircom, to supply its Bill presentation and Analysis product to their Small Business & Consumer customer base.
With over 1.2 million customers, eircom will use Ryder's product to get comprehensive billing information via an intuitive online portal, with an eye to reducing billing queries. The online bill pay feature will be available to eircom's small business and residential fixed line customers.
Martin Gillick, Head of CRM Project Release Management in eircom retail, said the Irish communications giant wanted a product "which could be rolled out to our Small Business and Consumer customer base."
Through an easy to use web portal, users will be able to access a copy of the bill and view usage trends and summaries through charts, with additional functionality to create personalized reports to monitor usage patterns month on month, set specific watch points and drill down into the bill to extract specific information.
Eircom, the leading communications provider in Ireland, provides a full range of services from fixed wire and mobile telecommunications to broadband Internet.
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