4.10 Integration and the implications for CRM 63
4.10
fore, rather than the application being hardwired, it was simply an assemblage
of components~just as a symphony is an assemblage of notes.
By being able to deconstruct, reconstruct, or improve on the basis of the
availability of improved components, applications could improve more mark-
edly than if they were hardwired (it's in this way that cars are significantly
better than they used to be because they are based on assembled components).
Integration and the implications for CRM
As will be discussed elsewhere in this book, CRM is a lot about inter-
action~interactions between sellers and buyers~and interaction across a
variety of touch-points. At the seller end, various individuals might engage in
dialog with the customer~sales representatives, call-center agents, and per-
haps dedicated account managers. Increasingly, the customer also demands to
do business on the Web with no other human involvement (but with an
expectation that the selling organization has an understanding and knowledge
of previous transactions that may have had a human involvement).
Figure 4.1 illustrates a generic Web services application (WSA) model.
The model presupposes that a variety of applications already exist and can be
integrated. The integration process utilizes integration tools from companies
such as IBM, Web Methods, or BEA to take business processes, represented
by legacy applications, into a store (called the Object Store in the diagram).
These processes or objects are then reassembled for specific groups~such as
call-center operatives, sales personnel, or even customers using a storefront
application. This means, in effect, that customer-facing staff are not restricted
to using point-product applications or switching between applications with
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64 4. I0 Integration and the implications for CRM
different interfaces. Rather, applications are specifically built for each and
every community of interest.
Until organizations, particularly large ones, move away from an ap-
plication-led computing model to a Web services model, the integration effort
in building Web services applications is significant. Companies such as Bow-
street, a trailblazer in the WSA segment, admit the need to partner with
companies such as Web Methods~companies that have earned their laurels
integrating plain old hardwired, legacy applications.
The sprint to integration is not simply to facilitate the process of building
WSAs. There are other key reasons. CRM applications feed information to
individuals who provide information to, and elicit information from, custom-
ers. If employees do not have appropriate information at their fingertips when
they are interacting with customers~such as recent transactional or interac-
tion history (across all channels)~then opportunities for cross-selling, for
example, can be missed. Similarly, if employees do not elicit appropriate
information from customers and do not record it appropriately, the customer
interaction may be wasted.
Giving employees, who work at customer touch-points, appropriate
information, is a massive challenge. Customer account histories, product
inventory information, and the like are typically contained in so-called back-
office databases or ERP applications. In fact, it is a great irony that the more
mundane the department within (say) a typical manufacturing company is,
the more critical and useful the information is that it holds about customers.
Credit controllers, typically, have better and more intimate information about
customers than salespeople.
Front-offlce and back-office integration is one issue, but another is the
fact that front-office applications do not share information. A simple example
indicates how fundamental an issue this is. Customers are increasingly choos-
ing to communicate via e-mail. In order to manage the deluge of e-mail
communications, some companies have invested in e-mail management
applications~applications that determine the category of content of e-mail
messages, suggest a response, and route the inbound message and suggested
response to an e-mail handling agent.
Now, let's consider a scenario in which a customer sends an e-mail, gets a
response, and then calls the company about the same topic. The odds are that
in most companies a call-center operative would have no knowledge of the
previous e-mail communication and would be unable to retrieve it from the
4. I0 Integration and the implications for CRM 65
e-mail application in which the communication is held on the customer
history file.
This is a major issue. It's just one example of how companies can build
islands of data that do not talk to each other. And from the customer pers-
pective, it creates the impression of an organization that adopts sloppy man-
agement processes and does not value customer relationships. Not good.
According to webMethods, the software integration firm, the four key
benefits to be achieved from integrated front-office applications are as follows:
9 Decreased time to revenue~integrating
front-office applications with
order processing and billing systems to allow products to be ordered,
shipped, and invoiced immediately.
9 Increased sales
because front-office staffhave access to all the informa-
tion they need about customer accounts, orders, and contracts. Having
this information allows staff to make better decisions, give customers
good advice, and take advantage of opportunities to sell other products
to customers.
9 Increased customer retention~getting
customers to come back time and
time again because they value the experience of doing business.
9 More efficient operations~eliminating
the need to rekey information
into disparate systems or to undertake reconciliation between systems.
In an integrated environment all the disparate systems update each
other.
In an ideal world, of course, an integration effort would result in these
changes being made overnight and the integration exercise would be simple
and straightforward. This is rarely the case. Even market analysts such as Meta
Group admit that the establishment of a CRM ecosystem remains a still unre-
alized panacea. Further, in a front-office environment it's never going to be
easy to integrate applications that are used by different people and depart-
ments and require fundamentally different processes.
Let's consider the example of e-mail management again. In most cases, if
companies have implemented point solutions for e-mail response manage-
ment and voice contact, the applications are totally separated. Voice calls are
typically routed through an automatic call distribution system and are proc-
essed by an operative with the necessary skills to handle the call, based on a
skills profile held in a call-center application. E-mails or Web interactions
typically take place via an Internet service provider to a mail server using stan-
dard Internet protocols such as POP3~and then to the e-mail response
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