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10/23/06 - What Is Most Important to You?
When you conduct an evaluation of CRM solutions, you formally or informally create a set of considerations upon which you make your decision. It's a safe assumption that the decision criteria reflect what is most important to you. Gartner tracks what criteria are becoming more important.
According to their latest studies, Gartner sees "radical changes" from 2003 to 2006. At the highest levels, vendor viability and technical architecture are becoming much more important, while functionality and price are becoming much less important.
It can be difficult to determine if these changes reflect changes in needs or changes in the vendor landscape. The safe "consultant answer" is that it is probably a bit of both. However, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that it has more to do with changes on the vendor side. Read tomorrow's column to see why I think so. Of course, feel free to share your thoughts.
Gary Lemke, Publisher
(Share your thoughts)
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TODAY'S NEWS (more)
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Indus and Vista Equity Partners announced they have entered into a merger agreement under which Indus, subject to customary closing conditions, will be acquired by an affiliate of Vista in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $240 million.
ATG announced that Jeppesen has selected ATG Commerce to power its online storefront. Using ATG applications such as ATG Commerce, ATG Commerce Assist and ATG Content Administration, Jeppesen will re-launch its commerce site to leverage ATG's e-commerce engine and personalization solutions.
ClickSoftware announced an agreement to provide products and related services to a leading provider of image information products. The organization has purchased ClickSchedule to optimize the scheduling operations of several hundred of their technicians responsible for new installations and maintenance work in Germany and Great Britain.
When Aurora Health Care faced the challenges of mounting Help Desk calls due to rapid growth, the company turned to FrontRange Solutions HEAT Service & Support to handle large call volumes and customize processes for maximum productivity. Since implementation, call-abandonment rates have decreased by nearly 25 percent and productivity enhancements save Help Desk technicians 58 hours a month.
Mercury Interactive announced that the integrations of Mercury QuickTest Professional 9.0 and Mercury LoadRunner 8.1 with Oracle's Siebel 7.8 have been validated by Oracle. The validated integrations help Mercury and Oracle customers optimize the quality and performance of their business-critical Siebel applications during implementations and upgrades.
Mercury Interactive announced that The Rabobank Group selected Mercury BTO Enterprise to help optimize efficiency, and improve the level of service to its customers while increasing profits.
SEMphonic announced that it has added MSN, Ask and AOL to its Competitive Tracking Service for Enterprises. Companies will now be able to track what the competition is doing, saying, optimizing and spending in Search Engine Marketing on those additional search engines.
The TAS Group announced TAS Select for Siebel CRM, its sales effectiveness solution. The new offering, which enables consistent revenue growth and accurate forecasts, has been fully integrated with the Siebel CRM solutions through the Dealmaker software application.
CosmoCom announced new partnerships in the United Kingdom with K2 Group, Message Pad, and Centric.
Webcom recently announced COPAN Systems, Inc. has deployed WebSource CPQ. WebSource CPQ allows COPAN Systems to configure, price, quote and propose their offerings across multiple sales and distribution channels.
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| CRMAdvocate Stock Index |
| CRMSI | 55.97 |  | 0.86% |
| Dow Jones | 12,101.78 | | 0.82% |
| Nasdaq | 2,364.08 | | 0.92% |
| S&P 500 | 1,376.65 | | 0.58% |
| Top Gainers |
| Vignette | 16.03 | | 0.79 |
| SPSS | 27.44 | | 0.75 |
| salesforce.com | 40.54 | | 0.67 |
| Top Losers |
| NCR | 39.13 |  | -0.30 |
| NICE | 30.33 | | -0.26 |
| RightNow | 17.44 | | -0.20 |
| Complete Stock Index |
| As of close 10/20/06 | |
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 White Papers (more)
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Defining CEM - Wen Joe Wheeler and Shaun Smith wrote "Managing the Customer Experience - turning customers into advocates" in 2001, they did not realize that it would help to stimulate a worldwirde interest in CEM that is growing all the time. For example, a 2005 Forrester survey found that 83% of executives considered customer experience to be more important than in the previous year. This year the figure is even higher. The question is why has CEM become such an issue for organizations.(GCCRM)
| | | Marketing Automation: The New Automation Frontier - Marketing, it's show time. Finance was automated in the 1960s, HR in the 1970s, manufacturing in the 1980s, and sales and customer service in the 1990s. This is the decade for marketing automation.(MarketingCentral)
| | | Contact Center Manager KPI Survival Guide - Contact center managers are confronted with volumes of data and dozens of reports generated by automated and manual systems and processes. They may have a surfeit of metrics, but lack the fundamental information needed to manage their operating environment. Too often contact centers have no way of systematically measuring and communicating how well internal and coprorate objectives are being met and identifying where change is required.(DMG Consulting)
| | | A Strategic Guide to Self-Service for the IT Help Desk - Self-service support can be a make-or-break proposition. A self-service strategy that is properly developed, tested, implemented, and managed over time can add remarkable business value through saved costs and improved employee productivity.(Pete McGarahan)
| | | Seven Actionable Tactics for Critical Contact Center Improvement - In this white paper, Tim Montgomery, founder of The Service Level Group and Certified Associate of the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), shares a career worth of valuable research to help your organization take its contact center to a more customer-centric level.(etalk)
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