Lets talk about some analytics

To start this blog, I will first narrate a story: Story of two Chocolate companies BabyChoco & ChocoSmart.  ChocoSmart is in the market for quite sometime where as BabyChoco has just entered the market. ChocoSmart, being the undisputed leader of the market, relies on their old legacy customer service application and does not want to re look their customer sentiment. BabyChoco on the other hand, with a hope to get better business insights decides to concentrate more to understand their customer needs.

BabyChoco decided to gather data from market to understand what consumer likes about them and what more they want. Soon CRM Consultant form a team and a nationwide survey via all possible communication channels was conducted. Data started pouring in from all the sales hubs.

CRM tool quickly started projecting the likes and dislikes of their consumers. With the help of the survey analysis they also got an insight about the demand of low cost dark chocolates which is not available in Rural India. Based on the survey, BabyChoco changed their business plan and started producing that type of chocolates that the consumer wants.

Soon the result started showing in. The sales shoot up for Dark Chocolates and the brand becomes popular in rural areas. Within one year, they beat ChocoSmart and become the number one Chocolate company in the country.

Both ChocoSmart and BabyChoco were using CRM. Then what special BabyChoco did? Well they realized the power of Analytical CRM and used it in a precised fashion.

In my previous blogs, I discussed about cloud option, various ideas to make CRM a success and multiple other stuffs. In this blog, its time now to go bit more deeper and discuss about a crucial element on CRM named: Analytical CRM.

So, what is Analytical CRM? As I stated in my example, it is something that helps organization to mine data received from various channel sources. It basically consists of five primary blocks. Interact-FineTune-Storage-Analyze and Construct. The below picture will give you a better idea about the flow of information in analytical CRM.

As you can see, upon gathering information, organization first needs to refine those information so that only relevant information gets stored in the DB. Post the fine tuning, organization stores all these data in their server. Another team, periodically retrieves those data from system of records(database) and analyze based on various business parameters. Finally based on the analysis, organization construct their marketing and selling plan and take the business forward.


Coming to the benefits it brings, as described in my example, it definitely helps organization to get more insights about their customers, what your customers like or dislike, what is their expectation, what benefits they would love to see in the product etc. Once you start getting these insights about your customers, it will automatically improve the relationships. Some research also proves that A-CRM helped organization to optimize cross selling and up selling opportunities as well. It also helps company to integrate enterprise strategy with marketing strategy.

However, like any other implementation, A-CRM also requires to follow some best practices in order to get the best of out it.  From my personal experience, I have seen that one of the key elements of success in A-CRM is capturing all relevant customer information from different sources and touch-points. Touch-points could be anything ranging from direct email, to survey, to call center data or simple ATM or Kiosk based data collection. You should consider each and every dialogue that your organization had with your customers. Furthermore, organization needs to apply various analytical methods to optimize their relationship with customers. Also, it is important to store good amount of historical data. We recommend organization to keep at least 10 years data with them so that they can analyze trend and also derive various plans based on that.

Hope by now you get a good idea about A-CRM.
Please feel free to comment if you have any.

Choosing the right service .

"Yehi hai right choice baby.." 

If you grew up in 90's in India, then this jingle must be familiar to you. A popular Cola giant has entered into the Indian market and was trying hard to penetrate in the urban and rural Indian market and get a solid grip. And then they used these few words and the rest is history.

 It is our choices indeed that determine our experiences. The choices we are making today will show up in our experiences in the future. So when it comes to picking up something from a bouquet of options, you have to choose the right one so that you can also say, yes yehi hai right choice baby [this is the right one for me].

In one of my previous blogs, I had discussed about whether CRM on cloud is a good option or not. In this blog I will discuss what the various cloud models that are currently available are and how to choose the best one that works for your business.

Honestly speaking there is not a “one Cloud fits all” solution.  On a very general level, there are 3 types of cloud offerings that are available in the market. They are SaaS, IaaS and PaaS.

So, what are they?  I know many of us have already seen the definition of each of them in internet. But today instead of re-uttering the same old definition, I thought of giving you a nice analogy that one of my managers once explained to me describing these types. It is about coffee as a service.

Consider that you want to enjoy a cup of coffee. What will you do? You have multiple options. You can make the coffee yourself at home or go out and get into a coffee shop or call for a home delivery and enjoy.

Let’s say, you are a coffee enthusiast and want to prepare the coffee at home. In that case you need to arrange all the necessary elements and spend considerable amount of time before you can enjoy the same. You might also run into the risk of disproportions of the elements which can spoil the taste as well.  So this depicts the example of Service on Premise.

On the other hand, you can opt to just go out, place the order, wait for your hot steaming cup of coffee and then enjoy. The chances of running into trouble with it are less as it is being made by professionals and they are kind of pro in it. This depicts the cloud SaaS model where you just need to give your requirement and your application will be up and ready to use in cloud.

In between these two offerings, there are two other offerings. Let us take the same Coffee as a service example. Imagine that, you want to still prepare your coffee but few part of the process, like brewing, grinding, roasting etc you want someone/thing else to do for you that is with a help of a coffee making machine. This hybrid model depicts the theory of Infrastructure as a Service.

And the last one is where you don’t want to go out and at the same time you don’t want to prepare it as well. In that case you prefer to call home delivery where apart from table and chair, everything else will be provided by the coffee makers. This is in line to what we call PaaS or Platform as a Service model offers.

So this is more or less what I understood from my mentor regarding various cloud service offering models. Below is a pictorial representation of both Coffee as a Service and Cloud as a Service.

When CRM shakes hand with Cloud

In my previous blog, I mentioned about what are the important points a CRM consultant should keep in mind before implementing his project. Out of those one of the key elements was to discuss about CRM implementation with IT team so that they agree to provide all required infrastructural help like SERVER, DB, and SECURITY etc. for a smooth efficient implementation of CRM.

 In a near perfect situation they might get ready to provide you whatever you want. But what if, during the discussion with IT team you realized that the IT team is not equipped enough to provide you minimum infrastructural support which is necessary to make CRM a success. 

What will you do? Will you stop the project or will you compromise? Perhaps no.

You as a consultant should never surrender in a situation like this especially when you have a power in your hand called CLOUD. 

You have to then sell the idea of how cloud can make life easier for the organization.

In this blog I am going to discuss that how C on C, that is CRM on CLOUD can help an organization to start using CRM without bothering about required IT infra on premises.

So, what is cloud computing? It is a way of providing computing services like application server, database, storage, security, networking, analytics etc. over the internet. It is a kind of plug and play culture where you don’t have to think about any infrastructural hardware elements for your application to run.

Now let’s see the benefits your client will get if they opt for Cloud.

Lower initial investment & faster deployment: 

As I stated, cloud is a ready to go technology where everything related to your application, like application server, database, firewall, security, load balancer etc. are provided by the cloud service provider.

When you opt for cloud, there is no need to set up expensive hardware and infrastructure at your premises. Hence, the initial investment cost is also less. 

Added with that, because of its plug and play nature, you can host your application on cloud and make it live in as low as half an hour. Cloud deployment is really fast which saves valuable time of your client. They can focus more on fine tuning the CRM application rather than spending energy on setting up infra for the project.

Data storage and Backup: 

Setting up data centre is one of the most expensive tasks that any company takes up while building their IT system. If you opt for cloud, you don’t even need to bother about working on the same.  Cloud allows you to safely store your data and make it accessible whenever required. 

Not only that, most of the cloud vendors have a disaster recovery plan as well so you will never lose your data. 

This in itself is one of the top most selling point that why one should opt for cloud. On Premise system will certainly not be able to provide you this much data security and back up.

Elastic in nature: 

Yes, you read it correct. Cloud is elastic in nature that means, you can easily scale up or scale down your application based on situation. For example, if you think that during Christmas or Thanksgiving days, your centre needs to access your CRM application a lot, then you scale up your application to cater a large number of users. Whereas, if you think that during summer, the activity will be minimal, then you can easily scale it down to cater only few hundreds of users. 

Thus cloud gives you the provision of pay as you use, by scaling up and down, and can help you to save money as well.

Tight Security: 

Cloud, even though available on internet and accessible from anywhere, has its own built-in security system which allows only legitimate users to access the application. 

By using technologies like VPC (Virtual Private cloud), firewall etc., it ensures that the application is accessible to only those who are meant to use it.

So, I have touched upon all the benefits of hosting CRM on cloud. But I am sure there must be some limitations as well. I invite my readers to provide their valuable comments in the comment section about what they think about implementing CRM on cloud and also share their experiences, good and bad, about the same.

Until next time, keep reading, keep learning…

About the author

Hi this is Santanu. By profession I am a product support consultant. I enjoy working with BPM, BRE and CRM suites, help customer implementing and maintaining their CRM and BPM applications. I also help customers to effectively implement various KPI models and enhance their employee productivity and performance. 

I have mostly worked with Pegasystems BPM and CRM suites. Have also good exposure on other products like Lombardi and Salesforce.

Education wise I am a B.Tech Grad in Electronics and Communications. I consider myself as an avid learner and during the course of my IT career so far, I have finished multiple certifications focusing mostly BPM and CRM s.  I have also achieved a diploma in Customer Relationship Management.

This blog aims at helping people understand CRM and its related terminologies quickly and easily. Thru my series of blog I will also share my first hand experiences with my readers and collaborate with like-minded product support and CRM professionals.

 Happy Reading and keep learning!