Is it time
for you to do the same?
Understanding and retaining customers is critical
to the success of any organization. This concept is the core tenant for
customer relationship management (CRM) solutions deployed by businesses around
the world. To be effective and deliver a real return on investment, a CRM
solution needs to be easily accessible, widely adopted and enable people to get
the information they need from it to easily do their jobs.
Key challenges with business applications, such
as CRM and ERP, in the past have been low user adoption and high cost. Applications
have operated in silos with very few people able to get any useful data from them.
They were hard to use and inflexible, forcing some businesses to invest millions
of dollars to customize them to a point where they would meet their business
needs. In fact, through my travels across the world, I have met with hundreds
of customers that shared their frustration about being stuck in the electronic
concrete of legacy applications – stuck in the quagmire of complexity,
inflexibility and low end-user adoption – and the desire to break free from it.
Today, as Oracle touts its CRM offerings at
Oracle OpenWorld 2011, we are asking customers why they should settle for a CRM
solution that is expensive, inflexible and hard to use while continuing on a
forced march toward Fusion. At Microsoft, we asked ourselves this about three-and-a-half
years ago, and we are glad we did.
As you know, Microsoft is a global
enterprise, with more than 40,000 sales, marketing and service professionals in
more than 100 countries around the world. Microsoft’s sales force manages
relationships with more than 145,000 business customers and partners.
Automating daily tasks and integrating valuable data and other key resources
are crucial enablers to the efficiency of the sales force. Three-and-a-half
years ago, Microsoft had an outdated Siebel solution that was too difficult to
use: input of information took excessive time, data got lost and, because users
really disliked the system, adoption was dismal leading to overall lost
productivity for the company.
Microsoft CIO Tony Scott, an IT industry leader
and change-driver for whom I have immense respect, recognized the need for a better
CRM solution at the company. Like many other organizations considering a big
technology upgrade, he wanted a solution that could be used enterprisewide,
provide flexibility to customize to the needs of various business groups, be
easy to deploy and, most of all, would deliver measurable value. Microsoft IT
evaluated the CRM deployment in terms of productivity savings across the
company, cumulative program costs, return on investment and employee
satisfaction using the CRM system – criteria that may resonate with you.
Tony and his team worked alongside our product
development teams to infuse sales team feedback into Microsoft Dynamics CRM,
giving this product enhanced BI capabilities and the
ability to personalize Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet end-user needs. Today,
this product is widely used across the company and, as of earlier this year, we
are completely free from Siebel CRM. In terms of benefits from Microsoft Dynamics
CRM, user satisfaction is at an all-time high with 90 percent adoption in the
first 30 business days. Since deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the company has
saved $10 million a year in reduced operations and support costs and has realized
more than $80 million in sales productivity gains.
All businesses are changing, Tony observes,
and CIOs need to understand how it’s going to change, and how fast. We need
systems that allow companies to take advantage of market conditions and market
opportunities more quickly. It is all about agility and a shorter time to
market.
Let me ask you: Are you ready to be
liberated from Oracle Siebel CRM? Microsoft Dynamics CRM is available today, so
you don’t have to waste time waiting for some future solution. Read more and try
it today at www.LiberateYourCRM.com.
If you’re a former Oracle Siebel CRM
customer who made the switch to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, I’d love to hear from
you!
Michael Park
Corporate Vice President
Microsoft Business Solutions