EVOLUTION OF BPR

How far you can grow pissing off your customers?

Posted on the June 4th, 2008 under Business Risk, Enterprise Software, SaaS by Gregory Yankelovich

Eric Savitz in his Seeking Alpha blog post sites the following:

Piper Jaffray’s Mark Murphy today launched coverage of NetSuite (N) with a Sell rating and a $14 price target, well below the current level.

Murphy’s thesis is that customers are not that happy with the on-demand business software provider’s offerings. “We believe the market has yet to include the potential financial consequences of what we believe to be lower customer satisfaction levels than the broader On Demand industry,” he writes. “While we think our estimates are achievable, there is potential downside risk to our long-term cash flow forecasts if customer concerns are not addressed.”

Murphy says his due diligence with customers uncovered a “higher-than-average mix of unsatisfied customers.” He says that the product gets strong technical reviews once it is operational, but that “deployment frustrates many customers due to the over-arching nature of the project.” He also says that checks with the Better Business Bureau find a 13x higher complaint rate for NetSuite than for Salesforce.com (CRM).

Last weekend the company agreed to acquire its competitor, OpenAir, which is specializing in Professional Services Automation (PSA). The OpenAir has over 300 well satisfied subscribers, but they have to integrate their business flows with other applications, such as Financials, etc. on their own. The Netsuite, by contrast, offers fully integrated approach and sees this acquisition as an upsell opportunity to OpenAir customers. I wonder how these customers will react to the NetSuite overtures considering level of their customers satisfaction.

Re: Businesses Still Failing To Use CRM Software To Its Full Potential

Posted on the June 3rd, 2008 under CRM, Change Management, Enterprise Software, Organizational Transformation, Sales Force Automation by Gregory Yankelovich

I found this in Jim Berkowitz’s e-Journal.

Here’s an article about a subject that’s near and dear to my heart, Businesses Still Failing To Use CRM Software To Its Full Potential:

DMC Software Solutions Marketing Manager Rebecca Haines notes:

The big problem with CRM systems is selecting the correct CRM software for company needs and getting the right amount of advice and training to ensure it reaches its potential. Resources are easily wasted without careful consideration and help, warns CRM specialist DMC Software Solutions.

What Jim kindly calls an article, I would call self promotional press release from DMC, completely fails to address is that many businesses start selecting software before they formulate clear justification and strategy for implementing CRM on the first place. Many “advisors” specialize in implementation of a specific software and consequently do not bother asking fundamental questions like “what business goals do you try to achieve by doing this?” and “how would you measure your success?”.

CRM holds a promise of breaking walls of departmental silos by refocusing peoples attention on a source of “natural” business flow of information - CUSTOMER. That requires some serious cultural change and for the change to take hold an organization, i.e. management has to plan and execute with clarity and consistency. Clarity and consistency are a lot more scarce than “functionally rich” CRM software.

It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.

  - Malcolm Forbes

Did CRM fail as a concept?

Posted on the May 28th, 2008 under CRM, Change Management, Enterprise Software, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

There is a thought provoking post published on Search CRM blog. It is named CRM in the contact center sees little progress and focusing on results of the benchmarks analysis conducted by Dimension Data PLC.