SaaS: Maximizing the Value of CRM & Business Intelligence Reporting

Globally the subscription based model (SaaS) is widely accepted when it comes to CRM. In India it is slowly gaining momentum. The high cost in acquiring and maintaining the traditional licensing model is paving the way for SaaS.

Lets Know about  some interesting statistics on why SaaS (Software as a Service) is fast emerging as an important model in EAS (Enterprise Application Software—ERP, CRM, SCM, and BI) including CRM.

In fact, SaaS can be priced via subscription, annually or perpetually. SaaS has generated growing industry attention and customer acceptance because it offers a simpler method to adopt and administer essential business software applications such as CRM.

It also makes it easier for end-users to access and use these applications via the Internet. SaaS does not require additional IT infrastructure investments in new servers and databases to store data, or private networks to permit user access. Instead, companies can leverage the SaaS provider’s hosting facilities and take advantage of Web-based access.

Increased adoption among larger enterprises will be the turning point in the uptake of SaaS CRM and will bring the model a legitimacy that it did not have when it was mainly used by small and medium enterprises (SMEs). As traditional software players step up their activities by offering proprietary SaaS CRM applications, large enterprises will be lured to the market, creating an entirely new base of customers who had previously been fence sitters.

Springboard Research also forecasts that the SaaS CRM market is set for consolidation as the number of players increase and bigger players make serious forays into the marketplace.

If you look at the CRM workflow (sales force, distributors, resellers, customer support, technical support, telemarketeers, telesales reps), much of the participants in this portion of the business ecosystem operates from outside the firewall. The sales force is traveling with laptops. Distributors and resellers are most certainly not within the enterprise IT system. The telebusiness functions are often outsourced, but in that early part of funnel building, leads and account data need to be shared with the in-house sales force in a time-critical manner.

With Salesforce.com, it is easy to do exactly that. And thus, I believe, the company aligns well with the Extended Enterprise trend, which the bulkier enterprise systems would have more difficulty adopting to.

The SaaS model also substantially increases application reliability because vendors perform frequent backups and utilise redundant hosting facilities to reduce the risk of downtime. By comparison, on-premise software deployments do not offer this safety net. These SaaS attributes let companies focus their limited in-house IT resources on more strategic corporate initiatives rather than reacting to daily application availability, maintenance and support issues.

• As mentioned earlier, SaaS or on demand CRM providers should take a more active role in working with their customers to maximize their services, as their success is closely tied to their customers' success. During the sales process, buyers should ask vendors the following questions to assess the level of assistance they will provide

  • Besides the standard implementation and technical support, how will you help maximize the business results? (e.g., business-oriented training and support, proactive communication and assistance providing updates/best practices/templates, active community of other users).
  • Based on your experience working with similar customers, what business metrics, reports and dashboards would be useful for us to track?
  • How does your application help track and improve business results? (e.g., dashboards, reports, analysis capability)