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Todd Bursey, general manager, PSA at FinancialForce.com

In today’s professional services organizations (PSOs), customer acquisition and customer satisfaction are more important than ever. Yet, the disconnect between sales and services teams remains a major roadblock to delivering on this imperative. And as recent research has shown, it is a fundamental limitation to an organization’s growth and success.

In our experience, sales and services alignment can only be achieved through full transparency into the business by both parties. Each side needs to support everything from the goals of a single client engagement all the way up to the strategic initiatives of the firm. Read more… »

Nucleus Research says online CRM is a cost-effective choice for more users [businesscloud9]

Information technology research and analysis firm Nucleus Research believes that cloud-based CRM continues to deliver value to its users, according to a recently released report. According to this article summarizing the report, the report also compares different cloud CRM options, including offerings from Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce and says that price competition between vendors has made cloud CRM more affordable and thus more accessible to a wider range of users.

Social CRM requires meaningful analytics to be effective

Social CRM trends have always followed behind broader social networking trends. Businesses look at new ways friends and families interact and find a model for how they’d like to interact with customers.

But by modeling the common interactions between acquaintances online, social CRM has largely been superficial. A social CRM strategy must not only work to collect data from social networking sites, but be able to analyze it in a thorough and meaningful way.

The trend towards analytics is only just now emerging. In a recent article on social CRM trends from CRMBuyer, Denis Pombriant writes that many enterprises have adopted social technologies for business use but the number that use analytics to evaluate that data lags behind. Pombriant suggests that gap will close. “The disparity between data accumulation and data analytics is temporary,” he writes. “As an organization accumulates customer data, without basic analytics, most of the data is useless.”

Among the most recent offerings to act on this social CRM trend is Cisco SocialMiner, released this past Friday. Cisco SocialMiner is designed to let companies search pubic information on Facebook and Twitter. The goal, according to an article from e-Commerce Times, is to put the information found through search into an operational model. The software facilitates the creation of dashboards and workflow algorithms to help social networking information be organized and analyzed.

The Cisco press release makes no mention of cloud computing. Some viewers, though, believe that Social CRM is a ripe target for SaaS providers. Harish Kotadia of Customer THINK provides several reason. First is that social media sites generate to much data for a local CRM system to store and analyze efficiently. Second is that the rapid evolution of social networking sites means that an on-premise system would require constant upgrades, whereas a SaaS CRM tool can be upgraded more easily by the provider. Both of these reasons add up to easier integration for the user.

Read more… »

Fujitsu completes “big bang” integration of SaaS service desk. (Press Release)

Integration services provider Fujitsu today announced the completion of a seven month integration project with UK-based energy provider Centrica. The project integrated a SaaS service desk from Service-now.com into Centrica’s existing systems. Notably, the release describes the integration as of the “big bang” style rather than a phased deployment. Most recent articles favor iterative integration, so it is interesting to see the all-at-once approach be put to use in so large a project.

CRM buyer’s guide compares SaaS and on-premise CRM systems. (eCRMguide.com)

This CRM buyer’s guide compares products from Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce.com, Oracle, and others. The guide is based on recent findings by Forrester analysts. It suggests that SaaS CRM systems are not as fully featured and lack strong back-end integration, but that they are gaining acceptance because they offer quicker implementation and lower upfront cost. The article also points out that Salesforce.com’s lack of an established ERP partner can “be a dealbreaker” for some enterprises.

Survey says most medium-sized businesses actively pursue cloud computing (information management)

A recent survey by ComptTIA, a non-profit IT trade association, suggests that mid-range companies are aggressively pursuing cloud computing. The article points out, though, that legacy integration remains one of the biggest barriers to wider cloud adoption.

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