Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) involving meeting client,
determining demands, heading back to office, determining stock/seal deal-no
longer suffices when there is so much to deliver in such little time. CRM
imperatives today require customer information and business intelligence on the
go. Sales representatives will only use an application if it is easy to use and
works the way they do-simply and intuitively.
Enterprise Data Structure
Mobile applications require nuanced thinking about enterprise data structure
and security. Effective user adoption is the greatest RoI challenge. Data
structures for the mobile salesforce should follow the philosophy of 'less is
more', making ease of use paramount across structured and unstructured data, and
collaborative communications like social media.
Crucially, consider how the data structures can interoperate natively and
harmoniously with the device and its data in any connection state. For example,
when pulling up a contact lead within a mobile CRM application, our sales
representatives should be able to 'tap' the phone number to automatically dial
up; upon ending the call, a 'call note' screen can surface for them to jot down
thoughts.
Actualizing Sales
The sales representatives' world commonly involves a chunk of time
performing tasks like managing appointments, and connecting with customer
contacts. Simplifying data structures and enabling native interoperation with
device, plus data store independence, should provide an instantly usable but
powerful 'mobile sales assistant' capability without concerns about data
synchronization or multiple data sets.
With one click, sales representatives should be able to view account team
information, customer contacts, communicate through call, email, text message,
or even get driving directions! They should also be able to gain insight into
the day's schedule, contacts, tasks, access recent/frequently viewed items, and
access store-and-forward capabilities to ensure sales productivity when out of
network coverage.
Pre-programmed automated prompts can remind them to follow up or enter notes
at the end of a conversation, ensuring vital information is stored locally or
saved to the backend CRM application in real-time.
The organization benefits from being able to run analysis on data coming into
their systems from the field. Benefits include being able to run detailed trend
analysis on products or interactions that can inform business decisions, shifts
in tactics or even strategy, or quickly structure customized targeted marketing
content or activities for particular customer leads.
Secured Mobility
Security is another challenge for mobile sales representatives. Besides
phishing or social engineering attacks, losing a mobile device has big
repercussions. Organizations must include IT and network management to allow for
resource planning and monitoring of end-to-end on-demand specific application
traffic, to ensure availability and performance expectations. A mobile CRM
solution should be able to talk web services to a CRM on-demand application over
a secure https connection with industry standard 128 bit encryption. Data access
within the mobile CRM application should automatically mirror a user's data
access rights as configured in the CRM on-demand application for that device's
owner. The mobile app could also store locally only the last ten most recently
viewed records for each record type. Corporate enforced best practices like
device lockout, reporting of lost/stolen devices, and CRM password resets
definitely help minimize or fence any breaches of data access.
The provisioning of the application to mobile device should be completely
automated for updates, with sales representatives needing only to click a link
to have the app delivered over the network. Once authenticated with username and
password, they are then 'live' and ready to access the CRM database. The
ultimate aim is to allow sales representatives have access to rich industry
leading sales, service, marketing and analytics functionality, wherever they
have access to the network, or at point of customer engagement to shorten the
sales cycle and close deals while on the go.
Michel van Woudenberg
The author is GM, CRM on-demand, Asia Pacific, Oracle
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in
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