Customer Relationship Management

This section of our technical library presents information and documentation relating to CRM Applications and Customer relationship management software and products. Providing timely customer contact information is vital to maintaining successful business environment. Accurate information provided in an organized and thoughtful manner is the key to any business success. TELEMATION, our CRM and contact center software, was built on this foundation. The ability to modify your Customer Relationship Management software is just as important in this ever changing business environment. Our customer contact management and CRM call center software was developed initially with this concept. Our Telemation Customer Relationship Management solution and contact center software is ideally suited for call centers throughout the world.

The following article relates to the CRM industry.

Creating a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Assessing three categories—implementation costs, benefits, and risk—helps establish a business case for pre-project planning, and post-project success measurement. Implementation Costs Implementation costs are often split between IT costs and business unit costs, where the business unit costs are typically equal to the IT costs.

Implementation costs include

• IT Costs

  • CRM software licensing and maintenance or support contracts
    
    
  • EDI, database, operating system and other software licensing and maintenance or support contracts
    
    
  • Hardware purchases and maintenance or support contracts including servers, storage and network upgrades (as required)
    
    
  • Software integration and customization, including design, development, test and ongoing maintenance
    
    
  • Implementation labor
    
    
  • Ongoing administration and support labor
  
  
  

• Business Unit Costs

  • Planning and requirements meetings
    
    
  • User training and learning time
    
    
  • Process change management

Tom Pisello has been helping companies get more business value from IT investments for 15 years. He is founder and CEO of Alinean, which specializes in software, methodologies and tools for evaluating, presenting and measuring the value of IT investments through the use of benchmarking and ROI analysis.

Tom holds several software patents, is a regular contributor to many technology publications, is a featured speaker at major IT and management conferences, and has written several books on ROI and TCO analysis; his most recent is "IT Value Chain Management - Maximizing the ROI from IT Investments.”