Stick With Siebel CRM

She may be old, but she's still good for more laps.

When should you continue to rely on an old workhorse like Siebel?

Recently, I argued that SaaS — aka cloud-based — CRM has become sophisticated enough to handle all but the most complex technical or organizational needs. Accordingly, if you’re considering upgrading Siebel, investigate switching. Most organizations will benefit from doing so.

If you’re not upgrading to cloud-based CRM, however, there are numerous situations in which sticking with Siebel is a good idea, including handling high-volume call center environments, locations without Internet access, government regulations, or for business intelligence purposes. Here’s why:

High-Volume Call Center Environments

To handle high-volume call center environments, most of our customers — especially in healthcare, financial services, and high-technology — select Siebel. For starters, that’s because they can integrate critical business systems with Siebel to provide rapid access to essential information such as claims history or order processing. Using Siebel also makes it easier to support multiple call centers and transferring calls between them. In addition, they can use sophisticated routing based on customer tiers, and track service level compliance with contracted service levels.

In high-volume environments, service reps need ready access to information, and systems that perform without a lag, to maximize their case load. Multiplied across every employed call center agent, even 10 seconds of wasted time per day equals appreciable amounts of lost time and money. Furthermore, using on-premise software allows you to tweak the network and IT environment, including computer-telephony integration (CTI) to ultra-optimize system performance, not least by having your telephone switch located on the premises.

In comparison, today’s cloud-based solutions don’t let you turn the knobs to optimize the technical infrastructure and functionality for your particular environment. Furthermore, while the service cloud is fine for even decent-size call centers — say, between 500 and 1,000 users — things change when you have more users, multiple sites, or a follow-the-sun program that provides 24/7 service from service centers located around the world.

Selling Without Internet Connections

When it comes to using cloud-based CRM software, you need to be connected. As a result, one of Innoveer’s customers recently selected Siebel, primarily because its sales reps often travel to places without Internet access.

Working offline can be quite difficult in a cloud/SaaS environment. But Siebel handles it just fine.

Data Privacy And Protection Issues

Many government agencies, as well as organizations regulated by the government, must store specified types of data solely within the country. For example, multiple Innoveer customers in Britain must ensure that their data never resides on foreign servers. For them, Salesforce.com and its ilk are not an option.

On the other hand, how long will it be until all cloud-based CRM vendors have country-specific cloud computing centers. As cloud centers expand, and vendors can guarantee where data will live, geographically speaking, this problem could go away. But for now, for CRM that touches regulated data, you’re looking at on-premise.

Business Intelligence Capabilities

Cloud CRM today offers excellent, built-in business intelligence (BI) capabilities. Numerous companies pull their cloud-based CRM data into local data warehouses, backed by advanced analytics programs. No problem.

But if your organization craves better BI, has Siebel, and it’s working well for you, then consider Siebel 8.1. Likewise, evaluate plugging OBIEE in to your Siebel application. The nice thing about OBIEE is that it’s got prebuilt star schemas, which makes building a data warehouse faster and easier.

Technology: Last On The Agenda

My “when to stick with Siebel” message may go against the concerted, cloud-focused perspective that I’ve been promulgating for at least the past six months. But here at Innoveer, at the end of the day, do we really care what type of software you’re using?

In fact, even with the fun factor offered by staging a CRM software smackdown, the CRM technology you select doesn’t matter. What’s important is ensuring that projects meet user needs, and deliver business results, whether you ultimately select Siebel or any other CRM application.

Learn More

If you choose to still go the Siebel route, stay educated on cloud CRM. Because whether you one day pick Oracle CRM On Demand, Salesforce.com, Oracle Fusion — which will be cloud-based — or some other software, cloud-based CRM is the future.

Furthermore, remember that CRM projects don’t succeed because of technology, but from ensuring that they deliver required business goals.

Accordingly, review our “top 10” marketing, sales or service steps to ensure that your CRM project benefits from CRM best practices and benchmarks, and succeeds.