SME Specific Requirements for CRM

indifool
Member

Posted 15-Apr-2003 07:35 AM
What are the differences in CRM requirements for the SME market segment?—the size of the business will affect the scale of use of CRM marketing, sales and service applications but how will it change what these applications are used for?

Jeremy Cox
Member

Posted 14-Jun-2003 10:35 AM
There are no differences in strategy development approaches, only scale of problem and any support processes and systems may well be different and less complex:

- evaluate customer portfolio
- Determine acquisition,retention,development goals
- segment by wants/needs/behaviours
- understand current capabilities to serve
- determine gap
- develop roadmap & objectives
- fix the delta
- measure performance
- refine approach

stone4crm
Member

Posted 19-Jun-2003 11:27 AM
This article offers some insight on the topic—"CRM For The Small to Medium Enterprise: King-Sized CRM On A Bite-Sized Budget" (Customer Interaction Solutions, MAY 2003)

http://www.tmcnet.com/cis/0503/0503crm1.htm

Vishal Sarkar
Member Council
Member

Posted 24-Jun-2003 07:17 AM
Functional CRM needs for a SME company are similar to that of a large company—the objective in both cases is to get closer to the customer and build a stronger and mutually beneficial relationship.

As far as CRM software applications are concerned, SME may tend to use mid-size applications that still provide all the basic modules from sales force automation to customer support, but in a more compact format.This is mainly driven by the extent and reach of the company, its business needs in terms of being multi-regional, multi-discipline, etc. The more complex the company's business processes across functions and its requirement of multi-regional / multi-location engagements, the more complex will the application get.

Take an example of a large enterprise that uses a top tier solution like Siebel. The company may deploy the sales, service and marketing modules. In addition the company may also use synchronization mechanisms, data mining and call center plug-ins etc as per its needs. Similarly, an SME company using a lower tier solution like Goldmine, can also in engage in the same activities—sales, marketing and support; it is just that the complexity maybe far less—both in terms of implementation and use.

At a very macro level, the business functions for an SME remain the same as that of any other enterprise.

Reiterating the fact—CRM software applications are just technology enablers for the organizational processes. Whether the company is large, mid-size or small—it can have its own set of appropriately sized processes for customer management. These processes will drive the use of an software application.

Vishal