A CRM solution should: (1) provide powerful functionality that supports your users in their daily activities, (2) be sufficiently flexible so that it can be configured and customised to meet their particular needs.
Deployment type will impact on each of these areas.
Functionality
The functional breadth and depth of CRM solutions varies significantly from vendor to vendor. It is important, therefore, to clearly set out your functional requirements up-front in order to identify the solution that is going to provide you with the best fit over the lifetime of your installation. While you may initially focus on the roll-out of CRM within your sales organisation, extending it to encompass marketing and customer service functions may be an objective over the longer term.
Solution maturity is an important consideration in this area. Generally, more mature solutions with a number of major product releases behind them will provide broader and deeper functionality than those with a less established revision history.
Companies should conduct a detailed examination of any potential supplier’s feature-set. This is particularly important in relation to on-demand solutions where the market is characterised by new market entrants. Today, the most functionally complete on-demand CRM providers are those that have leveraged their on-premise expertise to deliver their solution in an on-demand environment.
Configuration and customisation
Whether at the point of initial roll-out or later in the solution lifecycle, companies should be mindful of the configuration and customisation requirements of their new CRM solution.
Configuration caters for basic changes in areas such as:
- Simple workflow
- Access and security
- User provisioning
- Team membership
- User preferences
Administrator-level and user-level configuration flexibility will enable you to map your new CRM solution more closely to the needs of your users and business processes.
Both on-demand and on-premise solutions generally provide a wide range of configuration options. Customisation caters for more complex functional requirements such as:
- Creation of custom entities e.g. ‘venue’ in the case of an event management company
- Custom screens
- Custom tabs
- Complex workflow
Existing screens, tabs and entities can normally be customised with relative ease within both on-demand and on-premise solutions. On-Premise solutions, however, tend to provide a more effective solution where additional custom screens, tabs and entities need to be created from scratch or where complex workflow orchestration is required.
Owing to security requirements, customisation capabilities within on-demand CRM solutions are generally provided on a codeless basis i.e. does not require development expertise. The same online security considerations do not apply in the case of on-premise deployment. Companies selecting an on-premise solution, therefore, should investigate to what extent customisation can be carried out on a codeless basis.
Accessibility
Companies expect their CRM system to be available to customer-facing staff regardless of their location or access scenario. If your company has field-based or remote-office employees, then mobile access is a ‘must have’ requirement for your new CRM system.
On-Demand provides a compelling proposition for companies with mobile and remote office workers. You should ensure, however, that any prospective on-demand CRM solution caters for disconnected access scenarios; situations where an internet connection is not available. Additionally, if your mobile workforce uses PDAs, smart phones or Blackberry devices, you may be best served by selecting a solution that has been specifically optimized for mobile device access.
You may also consider on-premise solutions that have been fully web architected. This type of on-premise solution provides similar advantages to on-demand solutions in terms of distribution and administration from a central server to users over a broad geography using the internet.
Recommendations
1. You should fully define your functional requirements up-front and then determine which solution and deployment type is going to provide you with the best fit over the lifetime of your installation. Solution maturity is important, particularly in the case of on-demand solutions.
2. You should understand to what extent your functional requirements can be addressed out-of-the-box, and which ones will require further configuration and customisation. By using codeless configuration and customisation tools, regardless of whether your new CRM solution is on-demand or on-premise, should make it easy to carry out these changes without the need for extensive development expertise. Extensive customisation requirements are likely to be best served by an on-premise solution.
3. If you have remote offices or field-based staff, your new CRM system should be available to these users, regardless of their location or access scenario. On-demand solutions are particularly suited to this requirement; however, you should ensure that they adequately cater for situations where an internet connection is not available.
4. If your staff requires CRM access on a mobile device such as a PDA, smart phone or Blackberry, you should specifically ensure that this is catered for by your new CRM system.
