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Customer Support Review Oracle's CRM OnDemand offers both customer support and call center modules that can be merged to provide enterprise level customer support functions. The CRM customer support function facilitates the simple creation and management of customer cases (also referred to as incidents or service tickets), including the capture of the user profile, conditions, activities and comments. The CRM customer support module also offers a knowledgebase of historical solutions that resemble a FAQ (frequently asked questions) library. The call center module is distinct from the customer service function. Somewhat surprisingly, Oracle markets these related functions as separate modules. While modularity is generally a good thing in CRM applications, the concept of managing the calls from customers requesting support separately from the support case itself seems at best illogical - and at worst additional cost and effort in managing the integration of separate solutions. Data from the call must be used to create the case which consumes critical time while on the phone with a customer. The call center function includes tools and utilities to integrate with popular phone systems so that incoming calls provide a “screen pop” with customer information from the CRM database. This capability is a carry-over from the acquired Siebel Systems CRM solution that is deployed on premise and thus delivers tight integration with several types of phone systems. It remains to be seen whether phone system integration with the hosted CRM model is as useful as performance is likely to be dependent on the distance from your call center to the Oracle data center in Austin, Texas. For buyers who need phone system integration, we recommend a very thorough analysis of the Oracle CRM OnDemand service and call center modules as there are likely to be significant costs to connect the out-of-the-box phone system functionality to the wide range of phone systems in the market. This is even more evident when interactive voice response systems are used to route calls prior to directing them to a call center agent. Between performance issues and potentially high costs to connect the CRM to phone systems, this is a feature set that may be best for larger enterprises with larger budgets and in-house IT resources. While inbound telephone calls have historically been the primary method for service requests, the trend is shifting toward self-service portals and e-mail ticketing. Contact centers that handled the majority of inbound service requests as little as two to three years ago are reporting that the phone represents less than half of their total case volume. E-mail is a simple, convenient and real-time method for case submission and CRM OnDemand offers supporting utilities to facilitate e-mails to be referenced with CRM data via synchronization to the core e-mail service such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook. This approach is very different that that taken by service management CRM industry leader RightNow Technologies. Embracing a more traditional best practices approach, RightNow permits direct creation of support cases by e-mailing to a centralized service that applies a customizable workflow routine which creates and assigns customer cases. While e-mail is a growing channel for customer support cases, self-service via web portals is growing even faster. In this online model, clients can create and manage their own support needs and cases using simple knowledgebases and easy to create service requests. For both customers and customer service representatives (CSR), this process is far superior to e-mail case creation as it imposes basic data capture requirements to ensure that the support personnel have the information they need to resolve the request. RightNow leads the self service industry with its patented 'you must ask a question before we will help you' sites. While effective for the CSR, this approach can be perceived as rigorous process for case creation, allows for little customizability to make your portal unique and can actually offend some customers. Oracle's CRM OnDemand solution has taken a less defined strategy structure which lets each customer create custom web services to create their own online presence. While providing flexibility, this approach adds time and cost to CRM implementations. CRM OnDemand has some basic workflows built-in the core CRM system, however, does not provide a configurable and integrated workflow management capability. For companies that have software programming staff or who employ consultants for development tasks, it is feasible to use web services or an application program interface (API) to develop more advanced workflow capability. Unfortunately for customer support users, the base product contains workflow rules and routines that focus almost entirely on SFA business processes. For example, new leads can be designated to a sales person based on territory.
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