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DSC Tech Library
Customer Relationship Management
This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to CRM Solutions and customer relationship management software and products.
Providing timely customer service information is vital to maintaining a successful business. Accurate information provided in an organized and thoughtful manner is key to business success.
TELEMATION, our CRM and contact center software, was originally built on this foundation. The ability to modify Customer Relationship Management software is important in this ever changing business environment.
Telemation Customer Relationship Management solution and contact center software is ideally suited for call centers throughout the world.
CRM Best Practices: Creating a Shortlist
The following is an extract from the article "CRM Best Practices: Creating a Shortlist" by Joe Outlaw from CRM Daily:
"When choosing a CRM application, you want to feel confident that you have made the best possible decision -- that you have considered all of the options, within reason, and selected wisely.
On the way to making that final selection, a best practice is to create a shortlist of promising alternatives. The shortlist process involves conducting a broad search for possible solutions and then quickly and efficiently eliminating alternatives that do not merit deeper investigation. Limiting the effort, cost and time to make a decision is at the root of shortlisting.
Start with Requirements
A long list of alternatives and a set of requirements is the starting point for the shortlist process. The long list of alternatives is fairly easy to develop. Searches of the Internet, CRM conference sponsors, CRM trade publications and trade publications covering your industry should produce a list of dozens of CRM applications. Developing your CRM application requirements will require much more effort.
Previous CRM Daily best-practices articles address the processes of creating a CRM vision and strategy, conducting a CRM needs assessment and creating CRM project plans. One of the results of the CRM needs assessment and project planning steps is a detailed set of CRM application requirements (for those projects with technology components).
The next step is to conduct a gap analysis, comparing your current CRM application capability with your new requirements. This gap analysis will produce a set of requirements for new or additional CRM application functionality.
Establish Include/Exclude Criteria
Armed with your list of new or additional CRM application requirements, you are ready to create a set of yardsticks to use for including or excluding candidate applications. By the way, there is no official length for a shortlist, but five is a typical number of choices.
The criteria, created from the requirements list, act as filters or hurdles to pass to get on the shortlist. A long or unfiltered list of CRM applications -- any application claiming to be for CRM -- might include hundreds of names. By adding a criterion that the application must support sales automation, for example, you still would have dozens of names.
As you add more criteria, the resulting list gets shorter. If you add enough criteria, the list would not contain any names. The point is, the shortlist criteria should act as a coarse filter to exclude applications with obvious shortcomings as compared to your requirements......"
To view the entire article, visit www.crmdaily.com.
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