Professional Documents
Culture Documents
com
Introduction
CRM solutions provide important customer information and tools to businesses of all kinds, reflecting the name, Customer Relationship Management. They are particularly useful in enforcing levels of quality and specific procedures in a uniform manner. CRM systems provide useful customer data like past contact information, past purchases, account balances, and demographic information. They can be used to manage interactions with customers and to ensure that policies are enforced when dealing with customers. CRM solutions typically include a number of sub-applications such as Sales Force Automation to provide guidance to sales staff when interacting with customers; Marketing applications to help guide campaigns, manage advertising and control budgets; Reporting and Analytics to allow sales and marketing managers to gain insight into performance and optimization; and Service and Support applications to provide prompt customer service and call center tools.
Contents
CRM Market Overview and History On Premise Solutions Summary o Advantages o Costs Hosted Solutions Summary o Advantages o Costs
Comparison of CRM Types CRM Solutions by Company Size Solution Features o Sales Force Automation o Service and Support Solutions o Reporting and Analytics Conclusion
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
The biggest single advantage for an on-premise CRM solution is that you own it. You own the software, you own the data, you control everything and if it is what you need then theoretically there is nothing else to purchase ever again. But, like with all software, there are licensing issues and the most important ones are likely to do with support and upgrades. If you will need support, then you can expect to pay for it after an initial period and it is likely to be costly. But there are other reasons to go with an on premise solution. One is performance. With a hosted solution you are limited in control over implementation and are limited to the performance you provider can offer. That may not matter for some but if you want to be able to tune your performance and to offer things like virtualization where you might be able to scale dynamically and have much greater performance at certain times of day, for example, then an on premise solution is likely to work better. Another reason could be regulatory some organizations require complete and total control of data by federal or industry regulation. The most obvious example is the healthcare industry where patient data is strongly protected by HIPPA. While there are a few hosted solutions that can provide more expensive solutions to control data with proper audit trails, they are less certain, less flexible and could cost more. Finally, on premise solutions offer the ability to integrate and customize more than even the most flexible hosted solution. If your applications require extreme integration and customization, then an on premise solution may be your only choice. Advantages Many of the advantages of an on premise solution have been covered already. Since it is software that you bring in house and run on your own servers, you have full control. You can choose the level of installation, the amount of integration and customization and you control the software itself and the data on your own servers. This means that you can do more customization and integration, making for a potentially more effective solution. If you already use software from a suite provider of on premise solutions then the integration may already be done and be very tightly coupled. However, you will have higher initial costs for purchase of software and hardware, higher installation costs and possibly higher maintenance costs. You may be slower to receive upgrades if you choose not to upgrade you core software as often (at an additional cost). And you are tied more tightly in to the solution you choose so your decision must be a good one.
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
Cost The initial cost of an on premise solution depends on the needed hardware and software. While there are technically 'free' open source solutions, they still require adequate hardware and integration so they are not truly free. A typical initial cost will be at least a couple of thousand dollars and could go as high as tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand there are no additional costs later apart from maintenance which is not inconsiderable but could work out as a cost benefit over time versus a hosted solution for a large enterprise.
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
Cost Hosted solutions are usually priced in two parts. The first is a setup or overall fee that can be one time or monthly and can range from free to as high as $200 per month or several thousand dollars one-off. Much of that cost depends on the size of the installation. Then there is typically a per seat per month fee that can be as little as $15 per month to as much as $100 per month depending on the solution and options. For a small business of about ten to twenty seats, a typical cost would be a $200 setup and $40 per seat per month.
Hosted
On-Premise
Hybrid
CRM solutions that try to blend the advantages of hosted and on-premise.
Most onpremise offer forms of hybrid solutions. Some hosted providers with offerings.
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
On-Premise
Could be expensive and difficult to install and maintain.
Under 10
11 50
Price could be an issue. Integration into other parts of business operations could be a plus. Price could be an issue. Integration and customization a plus. Performance could be a plus. Price could be a plus. Integration and customization with existing systems a plus. Performance a plus. Could be issues with operation. Integration and customization clear benefits. Performance a clear benefit. Price could be a benefit.
51 100
101 300
301 +
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
Sales-Force Automation Contact management the most basic function tracking and managing every contact and their information. Lead management tracking leads and contacts with leads and conversion, helping the sales team move leads along the sales funnel. Sales quota and territory management managing the sales team and helping split contacts and leads into territories and helping sales achieve quotas. Partner management managing partnerships, affiliates and other more complex sales arrangements. Forecasting and opportunity management prediction and monitoring to help guide managers and sales teams as to where to put effort. Sales procedure and operations management managing the operations and sales process itself guiding sales, scripting, etc. Team management overseeing feedback, helping to control the management of the sales team.
Service and Support Solutions Email response management managing incoming and outgoing customer service request emails. Self-service tools web and voice self-service tools to allow customers to help themselves, browse solutions, reach out to the correct support teams, etc. IM and Chat live chat and IM tools to allow for instant interaction with a support agent. Productivity tools to allow increase service agent productivity, integration with support management and ticketing.
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226
Conclusions
Both hosted and on premise solutions can be the right solutions for a company. The real decisions to be made are around required feature set, scalability and growth over time and how well the solution will fit into your operation. It doesn't matter how good a solution is on paper if your sales team refuses to use it. So the solution must match current operating practices, match and integrate other required functions and systems in your organization, meet your needs for growth and features to improve your sales and operations and meet your needs for cost and return on investment. To find out more about how to match these needs see our hosted and on-premise comparison guides.
About CompareBusinessProducts.com
CompareBusinessProducts.com provides comprehensive and objective business product information to buyers at small, medium and large enterprises. Our experts have spent significant time researching, evaluating and comparing leading business brands and products and the most prevalent technologies. They have also produced comparison guides, price quotes, vendor data, and a wide range of other objective information for business product buyers to use in all parts of their decision making. For those buyers starting their research phase, we offer step by step buyers guides. For those aware of the technology aspects of their intended purchase, we have comparative charts that detail the features and offerings of each leading products. And for those buyers ready to purchase, we can have local product vendors contact you with their best quotes for your deployment.
CompareBusinessProducts.com
(877) 852-5226