An essay published in Forbes recently detailed a British CRM industry insider’s efforts to explain to Americans “the role of CRM in protecting your brand.”
As Anthony Leaper of SAP notes, “it’s what happens after the sale that’s of interest to me today.”
He starts with the correct observation that it’s not enough simply to link your CRM system to your supply chain system to see if you can meet customers’ orders on time, your CRM system must also be how you “experience of your brand throughout the life of your relationship with your customer.”
He gives the example of a big-ticket item vendor with integration within the CRM system “so tight that the ordering and fulfillment systems have looked at existing stock levels, made commitments, and coordinated delivery,” and as a result are able to tell a customer “precisely when she can expect the truck to pull up at her house.”
And yes, at the appointed juncture sure enough, on a rainy day in London there is the truck. Only it’s not from the actual vendor, but a company acting for the vendor. All good -- but what if one of the items the person has been waiting for has been damaged somewhere along the line, after it left the Roland factory?
Read more here.
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According to South Africa’s tech journal site, Vox Amvia has announced Stratus, which company officials describe as “a new cloud-based fax as a service” offering designed for SMBs.
“Rumours of the death of fax are greatly exaggerated,” says Craig Freer of Vox Amvia, the enterprise fax specialist in the Vox Telecom group. That’s certainly true -- no unified communications suite is really complete without it. Fax is still used widely for legal purposes as well as practical ones that email can’t handle.
“Fax is still a critical tool for many businesses,” Freer said, “because it delivers security, auditing and tracking that email can’t match. That’s why documents like purchase orders, invoices, loan applications and the like are still routinely transmitted by fax.”
But we understand part of the problem for companies, why they, especially SMBs, kind of want fax to be dead and gone. As Freer noted, yes, distributing, securing, storing and archiving paper faxes has always been a nightmare.
Read more here.
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A good recent blog post from Flexera Software, a provider of software licensing solutions, deals with software license management – specifically process improvement using automatic renewal.
While it may sound like a minor housekeeping issue, it has caused more than its fair share of headaches in companies that didn’t give it proper time and attention.
As the blogger notes, “I have recently engaged with a software publisher who needed to deliver licenses to customers worldwide. For some countries, customers are allowed to divide payments into multiple chunks over time.”
It must be noted that it’s the Flexera EMEA consulting department which authored the post, so clearly they speak from experience. “The publisher, on the other hand, must ensure the customer performs the payments at the times expected.”
Read more here.
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Well, maybe the tedious, pointless NBA work stoppage was good for something other than mercifully sparing us from hearing about the dull NBA for a few more weeks.
Telecommunications blogger Eric M. Danis, from Amdocs, and self-confessed “fanatical” Boston Celtics fan noted recently in a blog entry, “National Basketball Association, you are dead to me... I am sickened by the spectacle of team owners and players potentially cancelling this year’s season because they cannot equitably divide four billion dollars in revenue.”
He should talk. This reporter is a Minnesota Vikings fan. Futility, thy name is writ in purple. True Viking fans circle the bye week during the season. But we digress.
Danis promises never to return to the NBA, but, well, put the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals and we’ll see.
Ah yes, the point: Danis notes that, while communications and cable service providers “thankfully aren’t dropping the ball on loyalty as dramatically as the NBA,” they are losing opportunities to be scoring more points with their customers.
Guess what percentage of service providers participating in a global survey conducted by Informa said customer retention and loyalty were a low priority for their organizations just two years ago? Seventy. As in 7-0. As in legendary Viking defensive end Jim Marshall’s number.
Read more here .
