CRM is an interesting topic.
I had the opportunity to work for a company where I participated in a project for the integration of:
- Microsoft Dynamics GP
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM
- Sharepoint (for the intranet)
I’ve also worked in the Digital Agency industry, involved in Web App solutions, where CRM strategies play an important role.
For a client (Eg: An online company in retail selling shoes) would be beneficial to find a Shop (Digital Agency) that understands CRM from the strategic point of view and also offers services using software tools that facilitate the finding of insights, track consumer behaviors and helps to provide a personalize experience to the consumer; bringing value to the business.
There are CRM solution providers out there that a Shop can partner with. To name a couple:
There could also be a case where a Shop can create their own custom solution that could have as their center piece a BI system, created as a product/service for their clients. This flexible and scalable product/service can evolve to get integrated with 3rd party vendors and/or partners if it needs to. In terms of Data It does not have to be a complex data warehousing. A dataset, as a starting point, should be enough for storing data making it easier for finding valuable insights, defining targets and design/enhance the strategy that make sense for their client’s business, moving from a campaign focused to a customer focused strategy. Without going too deep into the details here are a couple of suggestions regarding the products that can be used:
- Pentaho: it has a commercial and Community version (currently installed it for a POC. I'm hoping to get to a point that I can write a post about it). Find more here
As I continued looking more into CRM solutions I ran into the book “Connected CRM – Implementing a Data-Driven, Customer-Centric Business Strategy” by David S. Williams. Instead of writing an article with multiple pages about the subject I ended up drawing this high-level diagram as a visual overview of the concept that I wanted to express in this post, which is focus on online properties (Web Apps) from the Digital Shop perspective. It could also be considered as a subset of a bigger CRM Integration Design for a client that has other systems (Example: ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning), internal CRM solutions, POS (Point Of Sale system), others) and channels.
Diagram created using http://creately.com/ |