There's one question that Atlantic Envelope Co.'s salespeople used to dread hearing: "Do you have that in stock?"
The simple query could trigger a salesperson's slinking off, right in the middle of customer meetings, to call the customer service department just to get a simple inventory question answered. And when it was finally time to fill the order, receive price estimates and check inventory levels, they had to fax paper forms to the customer service department and then get back at a later date to the customer about final pricing and inventory levels. Securing a sale might take days.
Then, in February, AECO got CRM (customer relationship management), and it got it good. Jumping right over the fact that some sales representatives don't have PCs yet, AECO went straight to the customer-handling dream of the future: wireless CRM.
AECO executives gave 10 sales managers and three field sales representatives Research In Motion's BlackBerry wireless handheld devices to pilot. The reps use the devices to check inventories and customer purchase histories and to reach the mecca of sales: closing sales on the spot. AECO is so happy with the results of the pilot that the staff of 85 field sales reps will soon start using the devices, according to Kerry Reedy, vice president of sales and marketing at AECO, a division of NSI.
While it's nice to hear somebody sing the praises of wireless CRM, few enterprises seem willing today to spend what it would take to join AECO's chorusâ€"certainly not enough to match the noise level vendors are creating about the technology. Throughout next year, said Adam Sarner, an analyst with Gartner, all CRM vendors of enterprisewide applications are expected to release some sort of sales force automation wireless CRM package.
In some cases, as with AECO, the idea is to equip sales staff with a handheld device or WAP (Wireless Application Protocol)-enabled cell phone that offers limited functionsâ€"such as contact management, lead management alerts, inventory level checks, pricing and the likeâ€"to accomplish predetermined tasks such as checking inventory and price or accessing contact database information. In addition, vendors promise one day to deliver wireless deployments that involve nearly full-scale CRM capabilities, such as depiction of full customer data histories and the ability to perform analytics on, and to launch e-mail campaigns spawned from, that data by keying in to a PDA (personal digital assistant) or a wireless laptop.
Sounds super, right? But enter in the cost of supporting such devices, spotty wireless access coverage, slow data transfer rates and security issues, and wireless CRM's viability begins to appear dubious. Gartner has estimated that, on average, it costs companies about US$2,700 per year per person to support PDAs. Add the cost of leasing PDA software applications, and you're talking $1,500 per device per year more.
Wireless or no, such pricey CRM deployments are a familiar tale. The cold, sad reality is that, time and again, organisations have succumbed to vendors' sales drives.
Throughout the 1990s, business spent tons of cash on CRM implementations, yet studies indicate that a majority of CRM implementations have failed to deliver: Gartner estimates that 60 percent of CRM software implementations fail. Instead of slipping into the same old money pit, enterprises should understand just what wireless CRM can deliver, experts say. This isn't to say that companies can't participate in wireless CRM if they perceive some benefits, but as the examples in this story show, you don't have to buy into the whole kit and caboodle to start reaping some return.
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Keep it simple | |
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To infiniti and beyond | |
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Wireless CRM - the impossible dream? | |
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