Sourcebook Educational Guide: Converging On Future Opportunities
Convergent communications technologies, such as CRM, Customer Relations Management, IP telephony, sales automation, virtual private networks, and multimedia contact centers, can help you to develop a decisive competitive edge. They can increase the productivity of your sales force, improve the quality of your customer service, boost customer satisfaction and retention, and raise the efficiency of your interactions with your supply and sales channel partners. Through access to real-time business process metrics, they can also improve the quality of your decision making and increase access to funding. But all this is possible only if you carefully select solutions that truly match your present needs and future plans.
Here are five good strategies for the successful deployment of these powerful convergent technologies:
- Focus on your business needs and the bottom line, not on the innovation and technology of prospective solutions.
- Choose partners, platforms, products, and services that support your type and size of business.
- Select products and services that can grow easily with your company and adapt quickly to your changing business needs.
- Choose solutions and partners that support your customer-oriented approach to business.
- Opt for secure standards-based solutions to future-proof your investment, protect your data, and maintain vendor independence.
Focus on Business Needs
With all the hype and hoopla about the latest and greatest technologies, it's sometimes difficult to remain focused on the real business needs that these technologies are intended to address. To make sure that you get a good return on your investment in convergent technologies, start out with a list of specific, prioritized benefits that you expect from a solution or vendor. Ask tough questions about the real cost of ownership, and don't be distracted by gee-whiz features or promises of future upgrades that are not relevant to your bottom-line requirements.
Voice recognition is one good example of a sexy technology in search of applications in the growing business market. The filtering and automatic call directing functions in use by some big companies are often expensive and difficult to deploy and frequently reduce the quality of the contact experience for important customers who are looking for real human communication. A more productive use of this technology for fast-growing businesses might be remote-access, "conversational computing" solutions, such as Office Anywhere from Conversay. This application lets a mobile worker, such as a salesman in a car en route to a call, have hands-free, phone-based access to up-to-the-minute e-mail messages, contact information, or other mission-critical data. For applications requiring complex information retrieval by customers, Automated Agent for Windows NT from Captaris (formerly AVT) lets users call in and receive answers to specific questions, as well as place orders and receive faxed confirmation.
The major features of a convergent system should provide your company with concrete advantages in terms of productivity, cost savings, and improved quality of service. There are some intangible advantages that accrue from buying the latest cool technology, such as the boosting of company image and staff morale, but these benefits rarely balance out the costs and difficulties involved.
The expertise of an experienced systems integrator, such as Expanets, or a qualified consultant is extremely valuable when conducting a needs analysis for the deployment of a convergent communications solution. Their experience in matching technologies to business needs can often save you time, money, and regrets. If you choose to work with an integrator at this preliminary stage, make sure that they represent a wide range of applicable solutions -- this will help to ensure the objectivity of the advice you receive. One of my favorite ways to qualify an integrator is the quality and quantity of questions they ask during initial meetings. In order to make truly useful recommendations, an integrator needs to know a lot about your company, your business plans, your employees, and your operational processes. Beware of the salesperson who, after a quick site survey, a brief chat, and a nice lunch, delivers a complete proposal for your new convergent communications system by e-mail the next day.
One Size Doesn 't Fit All
Most convergent solutions are scalable to some degree, but every system and application has a "sweet spot." Whether the gating factors include the hardware platform, the software architecture, or the technical support structure, there are definite limits to the minimum and maximum number of users that will be best served by each solution. A system that lacks the expansion capacity to serve your anticipated needs over the next two to four years is probably a waste of money. Conversely, a solution designed for use in a large enterprise usually costs too much to deploy and maintain. Cost-of-ownership issues for larger solutions often include extensive customization requirements, the need for ongoing high-level technical support, and a relatively high cost for "moves, adds, and changes." Ideally, your application size will fit somewhere in the middle of the vendor's recommended system size range. The advice of an experienced integrator of mid-sized systems can be valuable in the selection of a solution with a real cost-of-ownership that matches your budget.
Flexibility and Scalability
If your company is like most rapidly growing businesses, flexibility is one of your key competitive advantages. A flexible communications system lets you leverage that advantage by easily adapting to your changing business requirements. You should also look for solutions that will grow with your company. This means the ability to add users and to add and change departments, functions, and offices without a major "forklift" upgrade. Other growth pains you can do without include expensive and time-consuming retraining of employees and major reprogramming of systems.
The AltiGen AltiServ IPBX provides a good example of how a system's flexibility and scalability can translate into a business advantage. In comparison with some IP-based phone systems from vendors primarily involved with data networking, AltiGen's solutions usually require relatively simple systems integration yet provide a high level of flexibility. The AltiServe IP-PBX Communication Server Platform is the basis for interoperable, turnkey phone systems scaled for offices with 8 to 200 users. AltiServ Office is also scalable in the level of services provided to each user group or location. The basic system includes powerful IPBX functions such as voicemail, auto-attendant, and automatic or operator directed call distribution, Web-based management, and an integrated e-mail server. Other features and options range from CTI "screen pop" support (for Outlook, ACT!, GoldMine, etc.) to fully-managed multimedia call center functions. AltiServe is a standards-based system that is easily integrated with most third-party CTI/CRM applications and database programs. Equally important for rapidly growing businesses, IPBX servers in several locations can be linked via a variety of networks (WAN or dial-up) and managed by a single IT/phone tech at the home office. This capability enables smaller companies using AltiGen systems to deploy and support fully connected branch offices with a minimum of delay and expense.
Other flexible IP-based phone systems that support small and midsized businesses include the Toshiba Strata PBX Intel's Converged Communications Platform, and advanced solutions from NEC and Avaya.
Maintaining Customer Focus
Effective management of contacts and customer relations is critical to sales growth and profitability. Popular contact management software, such as Act! 2000, Smart Contact Manager, and GoldMine, provide a wealth of features and powerful functions. Surado's Smart Contact Manager 2001 Rev 1, for example, includes powerful marketing and sales automation features that should help busy sales and marketing professionals keep up with their ever-increasing workloads. We found SCM easy to learn and very flexible, and the basic $149 single-user cost includes Palm synchronization, fax functions, a CardScan plug-in, and even marketing campaign analysis tools. An SQL Server version of the program with expanded CRM functions will be available later this year. SCM SQL will provide advanced analytical functions and easy integration with back-office applications. The boundary between contact management, sales automation, and CRM systems continues to blur as companies, such as Surado, add functionality and power to their contact management systems. Traditional CRM suppliers including Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and Navision, are also moving "down-market" to grab a larger share of sales to growing business and to compete with successful mid-market CRM products vendors such as Convene, SalesLogix and Front Range. Oracle, for example, offers several CRM systems aimed at the mid-market, including modules for sales automation, e-business, partner relationship management, and back-office integration. Clientele from Epicor also offers a CRM system that is suitable for growing companies, particularly those with a devotion to the highest levels of customer service. Clientele has help-desk roots, and its careful attention to the tracking of complex customer interactions makes it particularly suitable for serious B-to-B marketers who are fanatical about client retention.
The appropriate CRM solution for your company should give you the ability to generate useful reports about your important customer-facing business operations. These reports should include sales metrics such as average time to sale and the percentage and type of leads that are turned into sales. Sales metrics are important both for planning purposes and for obtaining additional funding.
Customers First
When selecting convergent solutions and service providers, it's very important to look for vendors who truly share your appreciation of superior customer service. Some contact center solutions, for example, are designed primarily to reduce the cost of dealing with a large consumer base. This approach may be fine for big companies trying to squeeze the last cent out of a faceless mass of consumers, but it is alien to the strategic concepts of superior service and customer retention that work best for most growing businesses.
One good example of this concern for the quality of customers' contact experience can be found in Smart Connect, a contact center solution for growing businesses provided by mid-market integrator Expanets. This system keeps callers informed of the status of their call with automatically updated messages, such as "You are now the third caller in line," and give customers the option of requesting a callback response -- without losing their place in the queue. Flexible business rules allow for automatic escalation of a call that has been on hold for more than a specific time and even lets you transfer those calls to another office or phone number to ensure timely response and customer satisfaction. Skills-based routing also helps you to ensure that customers get to talk to the available employee best qualified to respond to their current need.
Until recently, this level of functionality was available only with very large, expensive systems that were frequently deployed by big companies with priorities other than excellent customer service.
Genesys' new mid-market contact center offering is also an interesting solution. It's a switch-independent system with advanced sales automation and analytical reporting capabilities. Rockwell Transcend is another customer contact solution that you might want to check out. It provides an open, scalable solution for small and midsized companies, on a Windows-based platform.
Protecting Your Assets
Risk management with convergent technologies takes many forms. These include securing your data and network against theft and vandalism, future-proofing systems to ensure long-term utility and cost-effectiveness, and working with your systems integrator to guarantee that your systems and software are kept up-to-date and secure.
Perhaps the most important step that growing companies can take to ensure flexible and secure expansion of their communications capabilities is the deployment of a Virtual Private Network (VPN). These systems establish secure data links, or "tunnels" between a company's offices, remote users, and trusted business partners. In the past, companies with limited on-staff IT support found it difficult and expensive to set up and maintain secure VPNs. The recent introduction of simple VPN "boxes" by SonicWall, Symantec, and other manufacturers has made it easier and less expensive for a growing business to set up its own VPN with a little help from a qualified integrator. A further step in this evolution was achieved when Imperito introduced its InstantVPN. Not only does this service-based VPN system allow for the virtual automatic setup of remote users in home and branch offices -- it makes machine-level, secure communications available to ordinary mobile business computer users for the first time.
If you maintain a clear focus on your business needs and take reasonable care in selecting the right technologies and integration partners, a convergent communications solution can be your company's ticket to increased growth and profitability.
Sidebar: Expanets is EXPerienced At NETworking Solutions
Expanets is the nation's leader in helping medium-sized businesses achieve their goals and solve their most pressing business problems with technology solutions. A single-source provider of voice, data, and converged networking equipment and services, and Web solutions, Expanets draws on its relationships with the industry's top manufacturers, service providers, and application developers to create unique integrated solutions that help clients to boost productivity, increase customer satisfaction and retention, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Expanets makes implementing technology easy -- freeing our clients to focus on their business. For more info, visit www.expanets.com.
Sidebar: AltiGen 's Network Architecture Enables Voice Over IP
AltiGen Communications is a leading manufacturer of IP-PBX business telephone systems and Multi-Media Contact Center solutions to the small to midsized business (SMB). AltiGen's telephone systems use private IP networks, the Internet, and the public telephone network to provide the convergence of voice and data communications. This allows SMBs to enjoy significant communications cost savings over traditional PBX technology via software-based maintenance and toll savings between office locations via Voice over IP (VoIP) networks. AltiGen's Distributed Intelligence Network Architecture (DINA TM) enables multiple AltiGen Telephone Systems to be networked transparently over VoIP and is the only IP-PBX solution with over 10,000 installations. Multiple systems can be managed as one with AltiGen's DINA Multi-System Management tool. AltiGen's AltiServ® IP-PBX has been recognized for excellence with nearly 30 industry awards. For more info, visit www.altigen.com.
Sidebar: Resources
The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) is the leading trade association serving the communications and information technology industry. In addition to a very informative Web site, the organization sponsors numerous educational events, including Supercomm, the premier annual communications and information technology exhibition and conference. To learn more about TIA programs, its members or their products and services, send an e-mail request to GEMD@tia.eia.org or visit www.tiaonline.org.
DCI's CRM Conference and Expo
Boston: June 19-21, 2002
New York: Aug 28-30, 2002
Los Angeles: Oct 30-Nov 1, 2002
Inc Magazine is a media co-sponsor of DCI's CRM Conference and Expo. The conferences provide educational opportunities for both the beginner in CRM strategy and implementation, as well as the experienced practitioner. The Expo features over 100 leading CRM related products and service providers. For more info, visit www.dci.com.
Sidebar: Imperito Instant VPN
Imperito is emerging as a leading provider of security software and services that support small and medium businesses. Instant VPN is the most affordable, effortless, and secure remote access solution on the market.
Imperito enables road warriors and telecommuters to make local Internet connections from anywhere in the world and get e-mail, share files, run applications, and use printers -- just like they were working at their desk. InstantVPN also allows businesses to run extranet applications with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Imperito is easy to find at www.vpn.net or call 877-596-4VPN.
