Flexibility is a very individual concept for vendors and end-user companies. End-users must consider their own organization's needs when it comes to choosing a solution that may be defined as flexible. For example, if an organization is in a growth stage, a CRM solution should offer the flexibility to grow with the company. For a company with unique user requirements, a solution should be flexible enough to offer the necessary customization options.
Taking the broadest possible view of what it means to implement a flexible CRM solution, executives should take note of three particular areas of concern, each of which is absolutely essential to the long-term success of a CRM initiative.
1. Financial Flexibility. Pricing and licensing models that worked for a company at one point in time will not work as well at another point. A small, rapidly growing company, for example, may initially prefer a subscription-based on-demand CRM model but later decide that a perpetual license, on-premise model makes better financial sense, in essence shifting costs from operating expenses to a capital expense due to a more favorable long-term TCO. As a company's financial situation changes over time, so should its options for licensing a particular vendor's CRM solution.
2. IT Flexibility. Planning for future growth is an essential task for any IT organization. Unexpected changes can strain a company's IT infrastructure, play havoc with budge forecasts, and interfere with other IT projects. In some situations, adopting an on-demand CRM solution may be the best choice, especially for organizations that lack the infrastructure or staff to support an on-premise solution. This is also true for companies that must deal with new branch offices, remote workers, or other types of growth that can overtax an IT staff.
Again, the essential point is that a vendor should provide both options, allowing an IT organization to move between the two, or adopt both usign a hybrid model as necessary. "Needs and circumstances change," says Ritter. "Whether it's an acquisition, management changes, regulatory needs, or business expansion, your deployment needs can change quickly."
"Having a solution that supports multiple deployment models provides customers the flexibility they need to adapt and thrive in changing business conditions," Ritter adds.
According to Hal Skelley, Inside Sales Manager for Tilcon, this ability to manage unpredictability through CRM is an essential factor. "We have grown through acquisition and have various sales processes that need to be consolitdated through CRM," Skelley says. "We need a solution that ensures our employees and customers are working on the same page, brings islands of information together, and easily shares relevant data with all the offices that need it."
3. Application Flexibility. Whether deployed on-premise or on-demand, a CRM solution should adapt to, and integrate with, existing applications and data sources. This includes the ability to integrate with back-office applications; business intelligence and analytics tools; and desktop productivity tools, such as Microsoft Office and Outlook. Flexibility also means that companies can continue to use external data analysis tools as well.
As addressed previously, the solution also should support a variety of customization options, including custom screens, forms, workflows, menus and toolbars, and scripts. It should provide these features using a combination of open standards (Web services, SOA) and codeless tools that open the customization process to the widest possible set of business users. Just as important, the CRM solution should integrate effectively with new applications, such as social media tools that play an increasingly important part in today's customer relationships.
My "future proofing" dilemma. Many SaaS vendors promote their solutions as "future proof" due to the fact that they handle infrastructure upgrades, software updates and other processes that may increase the cost and complexity of on-premise CRM deployments. According to Wallace, however, there are other factors that make that task more complex:
- Integration Challenges. "It can be hard to manage through a tightly-bound integration where changes to a SaaS platform's API break the integration," Wallace says.
- Testing. SaaS providers may not always provide adequate test systems and resources during major upgrade cycles.
- Custom Complications. "You may have to decide whether to build customizations required to support strategic policies, or workflows that will break a SaaS provider's automatic upgrade experience and require manual conversion," according to Wallace. "And that could mean not doing a key customization and limiting your options to a 'just good enough' solution."
All of these concerns make the process of choosing a CRM provider especially difficult for companies that demand predictability and long-term reliability. When it comes to adopting CRM to an on-demand situation, Ritter says, "It's the established application with years of experience addressing use cases that can make the difference."
"It's more than just being on-demand and Web-based," he adds. "It's being able to provide a complete understanding of a customer's use cases, giving them a solution with enough depth to maximize their productivity and the value of their CRM investment."