What is your concept of the ubiquitous CRM and e-mail CRM?

A. eCRM is a widely used term and rightly so. Media is used differently for practicing CRM. It's like IBM as well the man on the street saying 'I work with biology.' They are correct in their own right but mean very different things.

Anyone with a customer and a Web site needs to do eCRM in one-way or the other. The Web can be seen as CRM-enabled space. There are several ways to interact with customers in this space - e-mail, Web sites, databases, and mobile phones. But what needs to be known is that e-mail, for example, interacts very differently with customers in time and space than web pages.

• The capability to acquire data about the customer;
• The capability to assess this data;
• The capability to interact with data to provide meaning; and
• The capability to customize data.

Different service providers position their CRM efforts quite distinctly from each other. For example Service Application Providers (SAP) have focused their CRM on the supply chain rather than only on end users. So when thinking of CRM systems, one has to realize that these are well-differentiated systems and not everything under the gamut is suitable for everyone.

What are the top issues to contend while framing a CRM system?

A. The first fundamental question to ask yourself is 'what are the points in which you touch your customer?' The answers could be phone, e-mail, fax, direct mail, etc. Different approaches should be used while using such varied media.

For example, e-mail answers need to be simple while telephone conversations need to be interactive. The nature of data that can be collected from these points also differs.

The next issue is 'what am I going to achieve with CRM?' The most popular effects of CRM are to increase revenue by cutting costs, retaining customers, and cross-selling products across market segments. Consider Pareto's law that 20 percent of your customers bring in 80 percent of your business.

In fact, the volume of communication that this 20 percent segment keeps with you is often indeterminate. Hence responding well to potential clients in this segment is very crucial. In our experience, often the customers who complain the most are also willing to spend the most.

Measuring and classifying the nature of the response is crucial in giving appropriate replies, which in turn retains customers. About 30 to 40 percent of e-mails are sales leads.

Another crucial issue is to understand how CRM affects the customer. For example, every e-mail from a buyer of a high-cost product such as a Jaguar matters to the company. Whereas for a product like Coke or McDonalds, the impact maybe more on franchises or suppliers than the product itself. So the data points become crucial.

What are the top issues to contend while framing a global CRM system?

A.To fully exploit the potential of the Internet you should think of a global presence. You need to be able to handle every customer. The three big issues we have faced while implementing global CRM systems are:

• Privacy issues - culture;
• Enterprise responsiveness to the customer; and
• Multilingual issues.

Companies should realize that e-mail is a very private, sensitive matter to people in several cultures. There are data privacy acts and right to data laws, which e-mail CRM should incorporate. Not everybody appreciates his or her e-mail boxes being captured!

Next, the organization should be sold on the importance of customer relationship. When they earn just minimum wage, why should they go out of the way to help the customer? Do they know how e-channels interact with the customer?

The third issue is linguistics. Using a centralized e-mail CRM system, how do you handle customers from the Orient, Middle East, and Latin America, not forgetting multi-ethnic Europe? By 2010 there will be more Chinese Web sites than anything else. If you're going global, your system ought to be able to handle every type of language that your customers speak.

Companies often are unaware or don't understand the importance of these issues. In order for a company to see any benefits, an eCRM provider should help companies deal with such change management. That's why we chose our mission statement as 'being proactive; being responsive.'

What are the important technical capabilities e-mail CRM systems ought to have?

A. E-mail CRM systems need to handle large customer bases. One has to keep in mind that 50 percent of all Internet traffic today is e-mails. Walk into any cyber café - what are people doing there? - They are mostly e-mailing. There are 74 million people today having e-mail boxes, which will become 1.2 billion people by 2004. Seamless integration is imperative.

Next is interoperability with multiple data points. PBX and telephones are becoming archaic as standalone systems. We already see the advent of voice e-mails for the PC and every other sort of mobile device. The mailbox is residing on PCs, mobile devices, and every sort of accessible device.

Can you do CRM with such data types? Artificial Intelligence techniques such as pattern recognition and contextualization are the foundations on which e-mail CRM systems can learn. Many e-mail CRM systems are merely number crunching systems, which don't learn from the past.

What factors should be considered while making a cost-benefit analysis about e-mail-based CRM?

A. The most important benefits that accrue from e-mail CRM are due to retaining new customers, which reduces operating costs, and acquiring new customers by the power of e-mail. So the first factor is how many customers can I potentially retain by using e-mail CRM?

A very good reason to practice e-mail CRM is because the cost of finding a new customer is much higher than retaining an existing one. E-mail CRM cuts down on your operations and servicing costs while retaining customers. We have seen that e-mail CRM saves up to 75 percent of customer service costs and thereby increases your ROI.

Looking at the evolution of cost models in the software industry, standalone systems have proven to be very expensive. Apart from the software itself, personnel, upgrades, security, and user licenses all add to overhead. With the advent of open systems it is possible to think of outsourcing and development requirements, which reduces costs and gives more quality. The ASP model is a sensible deployment model for e-mail CRM, especially for companies that want to stick to their core competency.