William Band

Author Profile

William Band

Forrester Research

Bill Band is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. He is a leading expert on CRM topics, having helped organizations define customer-driven strategies to achieve distinction in the marketplace for his entire career. Click here to download free related research from Forrester (free site registration required).

The Eight Questions To Ask Before You Buy A CRM Solution

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Posted on 2012-05-22

During the last five years, the customer relationship management (CRM) solutions market has experienced considerable growth and turmoil. Quickly evolving technologies like multi-channel digital customer engagement, real-time decisioning, social computing, business process management (BPM), and mobility are creating new ways for organizations to deliver differentiated customer experiences. There has been a rapid rise in the popularity of solutions deployed through the “cloud,” and vendors have acquired direct competitors, or have snapped-up companies in adjacent spaces to broaden their customer management offerings. As a result, business and IT leaders are often confused about which solution to choose.

I have just finished Forrester’s Wave^TM evaluation of the leading CRM solutions. We evaluated 18 solutions against 411 criteria and will publish our findings in June. While every CRM solution has strengths and weaknesses, here are the key questions you need to ask to...

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Marketers: Have You Defined Your Technology Roadmap?

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Posted on 2012-03-06

In a recent report, my colleague Robert Brosnan correctly spotlights that marketers require ever more technology to capture, integrate, analyze, and apply customer data to marketing programs. Indeed, the technology portfolio that marketing leaders must understand and manage is exploding. Marketers typically have a portfolio of technology assets to support marketing planning, marketing asset management, campaign management, segmentation, and predicative modeling. And most marketers work with online marketing tools for email, mobile, social, and web analytics.

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Don't Let CRM Pitfalls Trip You Up

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Posted on 2012-03-01
My Twitter feed is going wild with #social, #mobile, #CX, and #bigdata hype. But Forrester clients want practical advice for today, in addition to spotting changes on the horizon.

One of the most common questions I get is: “What are the CRM pitfalls I need to watch out for?” I surveyed nearly 150 companies to find out the problems they faced with their CRM initiatives. Here is what you need to pay attention to:
- Crafting a customer relationship management strategy. Eighteen percent of the problems at the companies I surveyed pertain to CRM strategy. Within the CRM strategy category, specific pitfalls identified include: inadequate deployment methodologies (40%), poorly defined business requirements (25%), and not achieving organizational alignment on objectives (18%).
“Reaching a consensus between IT’s objectives and those of the business unit was a problem.” (Marketing manager, manufacturing company)...
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Transform Business Processes For Breakthrough Customer Experiences

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Posted on 2012-01-10

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that touch customers.

In talking with nearly 30 organizations, consulting companies, and solution vendors, I found that instead of deploying slow-to-change packaged applications or building difficult-to-...

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The Top Thirteen Customer Management Trends for 2012

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Posted on 2012-01-03

The Top Thirteen Customer Relationship Management Trends for 2012

What are the key trends that CRM trends that business and IT professionals need to pay attention to in setting your plans during 2012? Here are the top trends that I am tracking. My full report that spotlights our latest research and recommendations for how to compete in The Age of the Customer will be published in late January.

1: Customer experience management moves beyond aspiration to strategy. More organizations will move beyond empty goals like becoming “customer-obsessed” and to define clear and actionable customer experience strategies. The strategy must meet three tests: 1) defines the intended experience; 2) directs employee activities and decision...

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CRM And BPM Solutions Converge To Domesticate Untamed Customer Processes

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Posted on 2011-12-20

I’ve just finished up several months of research digging into the best practices of how leading organizations aspire to implement outside-in, customer-focused, cross-functional processes that transform the organization and set it on the path toward continuous improvement. I found that these companies are moving from isolated business process management (BPM) and/or front-office customer relationship management (CRM) projects toward broader transformation initiatives across the organization. At the core of this trend is a desire by these organizations, especially in services industries, to domesticate their “untamed” or “invisible” processes that...

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Corporate culture clash looms with Oracle's acquisition of RightNow

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Posted on 2011-10-24

The acquisition of RightNow by Oracle makes sense for both companies CRM solutions strategies. Oracle wants to beef up its overall “cloud” portfolio. This is a strength of RightNow- one of the pioneers of the SaaS deployment model. It also needs a stronger play in the customer service sector- an area that salesforce.com targeted several years ago. This is the core domain strength of RightNow.

RightNow has had good success, posting strong growth over the last several years – but a $250 million dollar software company finds itself at an awkward size to compete against the giants like Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.

The big risk to this deal is that the corporate cultures of Oracle and RightNow could not be more different. Oracle’s bare knuckle-approach to sales and how it treats customers is 180 degrees the opposite to RightNow’s ethos of client-centricity, and flexibility.

Many clients that have chosen RightNow may not be happy to hear that Oracle is their new...

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Are CRM Solutions Soon To Be Displaced By Dynamic BPM?

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Posted on 2011-10-13

As I mentioned in a blog post last April, in the midst of the buzz in the CRM technology world about “social” and “mobile” - I continue to see rising demand for customer management solutions that have a strong core of workflow and business process management capabilities. I call this phenomenon “CRM meets BPM.”

I have just launched a research cycle to delve into the topic more deeply and would very much like get your perspective on this trend.

This emergence of process-centric customer management solutions is being driven by an increasing recognition by companies, particularly in services industries, that if they want to deliver great customer experiences, they must learn how to get control over their “...

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Four Ways To Deliver Breakthrough Customer Experiences

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Posted on 2011-09-07

Better customer experience drives improvement for three types of customer loyalty: willingness to consider another purchase, likelihood to switch business to a competitor, and likelihood to recommend to a friend or colleague. But how does that affect a company’s bottom line? Our models estimate that the revenue impact from a 10 percentage-point improvement in a company’s performance, as measured by Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CxPi) score, could be in excess of $1 billion.

My colleague at Forrester, Megan Burns, spotlights in her research how companies are using best practices to improve their CxPi score and capture untapped revenue growth opportunities:

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50 Best Practices For Implementing Mobile CRM

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Posted on 2011-08-23

“Mobile CRM” is a hot topic with my clients. The emergence of ubiquitous high-speed broadband connectivity, smartphones, and tablet devices with enormous computing power and longer battery life, along with increased employee adoption of touchscreen devices in every sphere of life, are all trends that serve to liberate IT from the desktop.

However, the state of mobile CRM solution support is fragmented. While there are platforms and solutions that cater to specific industries, no mobile CRM vendor currently offers out-of-the-box cross-industry functionality. The gap between the functionality available via desktop and mobile CRM applications is far from being bridged. And vendors sometimes adopt a single-device or single operating system (OS) strategy, limiting the range of devices and OSes available to companies.

To help define a path for navigating this complex landscape, I interviewed 25 CRM solution vendors, systems integrators, mobile solutions developers, and user...

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