TODAY’S INTEGRATION CHALLENGES
taken from white paper
More organizations are considering the on demand model as a viable deployment option for CRM – increased flexibility, rapid implementation, and reduced costs allow businesses with limited resources and time to quickly realize business gains.Larger organizations in particular are considering on demand applications for the flexibility a subscription-based offering provides to internal lines of business. For example, an organization may want telesales representatives to have an on demand solution for automating sales processes and centralizing lead, opportunity and account information while customer service representatives have access to an on premise CRM solution with highly robust inbound and outbound call center capabilities.
The true potential of any new application investment – be it on demand or on premise, front or back office – is realized when information readily flows across applications to support a streamlined business process. The problem is that applications often operate within silos, inhibiting collaboration and coordination across repositories of information and reducing sales, marketing, and service effectiveness. For example, attempts to integrate an on demand CRM solution with a well established on premise CRM system risks fragmenting key customer data and undermining the effectiveness of these systems. Or, efforts to introduce a new on demand CRM solution to support the roll out of a new sales force, while at the same time relying on an existing on premise ERP system for order fulfillment and accounting, could have potentially disastrous consequences with customer orders and invoices. To accommodate for these shortcomings, organizations endure suboptimal processes that conform to integration restrictions rather than streamlining practices that increase business productivity and customer effectiveness.
The result is a disjointed user experience, increased administrative burdens on sales representatives, and ultimately, reduced sales effectiveness. Because data stored in one system is not synchronized or shared with another, organizations risk having outdated or even inaccurate information displayed to sales users. When information is not readily available through a single application, salespeople are forced to toggle between applications to access and interact with relevant data such as leads, quotes, product information, and service requests. As a result, sales representatives are forced to spend time out of their busy day reconciling information and manually reentering data in other applications to make up for the functional disparity, increasing the chance for inaccurate and redundant customer information to be
incorporated within an organization’s information systems. Furthermore, this administrative overhead reduces the time salespeople have available to spend with prospects and customers, affecting overall sales productivity.
What organizations need is a virtual suite of applications that behave and interoperate as a single entity.
