Technology for Collaborative Relationship Networks

In the next five years, instead of just automating individual channels, collaborative e-business solutions will support more complex many-to-many relationship networks. In addition to optimizing vendor-to-partner relationships, as PRM solutions do today, collaborative solutions will ensure that the enterprise, partners and customers can all work together in a profitable relationship network or "C-Web."

The same competitive forces that caused CRM to become a multi-billion dollar industry in a few short years are also driving C-Webs. Competitive advantage based on a "hot product" is fleeting. Increasingly, enterprises must create tighter, collaborative linkages with partners, suppliers and customers, squeezing out time and costs while enhancing the customer experience and total value proposition. In the future, automating individual relationships, the current state-of-the-art with multi-channel CRM, will not be enough to create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Traditional CRM is shifting outside the enterprise. First, to customers and partners in the eCRM and PRM trends. Then, over the next few years, to a multi-enterprise or "collaborative e-business" approach to enable business process integration, content management and work team collaboration. Goal: create, grow and retain profitable networks of customer and partner relationships. Sounds a lot like CRM, doesn't it, just updated for the interconnected world, the real world in which we live.

The Important Tools
Knowing what problems you need to solve is 51 percent of the solution. Walk into Home Depot and you're inundated with a thousand tools. It's hopeless--unless you know you need a screwdriver. That cuts 98 percent of everything available out of the discussion. You need a Phillips screwdriver? There goes another 1.5 percent. You have six dollars to spend? Now you're down to a manageable selection. Now what color would you like?

Any technology works the same way. All those fancy gizmos, no matter how pricey or complicated, are merely tools to solve your business problems and improve your organization's ability to please customers. Nevertheless, you'd be surprised about how many CRM implementations court disaster by purchasing technology with only a vague, sketchy idea of what tools are actually needed.

Here's what you're likely to find in the aisles of a store full of B2B collaboration tools:

•Lead and Opportunity Management. These tools help deploy sophisticated systems to target leads to the most qualified partners, based on certification, geography, or other business rules. These leads can then be accessed via a secure extranet by the targeted partner. But watch out for "death at the browser interface." Next-generation systems will allow vendors and partners to exchange leads and lead status information through process integration, rather than forcing visits to yet another portal.

•Order Management. Early on, vendors experimenting with e-commerce discovered their channel partners wielded considerable market power and were none too pleased to be cut out of the flow of business. Distributed e-commerce systems allow customers to visit a vendor's Web site, do some research, then fill a shopping cart. The vendor's site helps the customer pick the appropriate partner, based on geography, price or other factors, and the shopping cart is electronically transferred to the selected partner's site. This is great collaborative e-business, leveraging the strengths of each party.

•Service Incident Management. Post-sales service and support is a costly fact of life in any business. Collaborative service systems help glue customer service processes together across multiple organizations. A customer service request can be tracked across departments or companies using a single Web page, much like you'd track a shipment via the FedEx Web site.

•Integrated Marketing Portals. Portals have limitations in B2B processes, but they're a great way to reach consumers. Effective portal tools use XML to aggregate content streams from multiple parties, then syndicate this information in a consumer-facing portal. If the content changes at the source, it's changed in the portal automatically without requiring a slow and costly traditional Web publishing process.

• Team Collaboration. People still do the real work in complex selling and service scenarios. Even with robust relationship management systems, people still need to interact using e-mail, desktop documents, project plans, etc. Collaboration tools allow companies to manage this unstructured information via shared workspaces that can be used by customers, partners and employees. Using such systems can help an enterprise rapidly form teams and enable people to work faster and smarter. That's a good idea in any economy.

Choices, Choices
It can't be stressed too frequently that a fundamental determinant of your CRM tools' success will be how well they integrate sales, service and marketing functions. The more effectively they work together in presenting the single face of the customer to all possible touch points across your relationship network, the more capably your employees and partners will do their jobs, at the lowest possible cost.

Ease of use is also critical. When in doubt, keep it simple. Technically elegant but hard to use systems will not be accepted, and you won't get the payback you seek.

Choosing the right solution can be challenging in a multi-billion industry selling CRM and e-business technology. In theory, you have hundreds of choices. But in reality, after you've detailed your top customer-driven requirements, you should have narrowed the field down to a small number of practical choices.

If you haven't, you could very well end up needing a screwdriver and buying a riding mower. If you're still confused or overwhelmed, look at the vendor's client list. Would you fit comfortably there? If not, keep looking.