1. A Study on Social Collaboration and their Relevance
to CRM Solutions
Project Report
(A Report Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Post Graduate
Diploma in Business Management in University of Hyderabad)
Submitted by
Mr. Garnepudi Madhu Krishna
Enrollment No: 24BM00780-11
PGDBM: 2011-12 (Feb 2012)

2. CERTIFICATE OF THE GUIDE
This is to certify that the Project Work titled “A study on social
collaboration and their relevance to CRM solutions” is a bonafide work of
Mr. Garnepudi Madhu Krishna, Enroll No. 24BM00780-11 carried out in
Qontext Inc, (a business unit of Pramati Technologies Pvt Ltd) Hyderabad
in partial fulfillment for the award of Post Graduate Diploma in Business
Management (PGDBM) in University of Hyderabad under my guidance.
This project work is original and not submitted earlier for the award of any
degree or diploma or associate ship of any other University/Institution.
Signature of the Guide
Rajiv Shivane
VP Engineering
Qontext Inc.
Auriga 6th Floor,
Ascendas IT Park,
Madhapur
Hyderabad
Place:
Date:
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3. DECLARATION
I, Mr. Garnepudi Madhu Krishna hereby declare that the project work
titled “A study on Social Collaboration and their relevance to CRM
solutions” is the original work done by me and submitted to the University
of Hyderabad in partial fulfillment of requirements for the award of Post
Graduate Diploma in Business Management (PGDBM) in Marketing is a
record of original work done by me under the supervision of Sri Rajiv
Shivane, VP Engineering, Qontext Inc (a Business Unit of Pramati
Technologies Pvt Ltd), Hyderabad.
Enroll No. 24BM00780-11
Date:
Signature of Student
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4. Abstract
From Wikipedia, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a widely
implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers,
clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and
synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for
marketing, customer service, and technical support. Even though traditional
Spread Sheet software like Microsoft Excel is used for maintaining customers,
contacts and account information; now there are sophisticated products in the
market that automate multiple use cases like converting leads into customers and
managing accounts information, providing us knowledge and tools that help us in
sustaining and growing business. Most Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
systems have this CRM component Eg: Microsoft CRM, Oracle Siebel, SAP CRM
With the prevalent usage of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn etc., customers are now sharing their thoughts, experiences and reviews
to wider audience. As this may lead to loosing existing opportunities, extra care
has to be taken in reading the customers pulse all the time. As Customers inputs
are translated to end products and services, the key element is the communication
of these customer requirements at appropriate levels at all levels in the
products/services planning to development to delivery. Now the focus is shifting
from timely delivery and customer satisfaction to customer involvement in the
overall communication channel that connects all stake holders internal and
external to the organization. Here evolved Enterprise Social Software (Enterprise
2.0), comprises social software as used in "enterprise" (business/commercial)
contexts, addressing great collaborative environment to keep everyone in the same
page.
The CRM software systems are now evolving to address this missing need of
social collaboration. There are intermediate software systems like Qontext to
bridge the gap between existing software systems to construct the collaboration
platform. The Enterprise Application Integration platform connects information
where as this collaboration platform is over and above it, connecting the people
involved.
The scope of this project is limited to studying the typical CRM use cases using
popular software: SugarCRM and Salesforce. Then proceed to collaboration use
cases using Qontext Social collaboration software.
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5. Table of Contents
The Motivation: Typical Challenges in CRM World
Importance of CRM Software
Technology Trends
The Social Collaboration
CRM Social Collaboration Use Cases
Recommendations and Conclusion
Appendix A: Qontext Enterprise Collaboration Software
Appendix B: Qontext Collaboration inside SugarCRM
Appendix C: SalesForce using Chatter
References
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6. The Motivation: Typical Challenges in CRM world
o Challenge: Can I have single source of marketing and sales information
along with internal engagement discussion information any time on
demand?
Reason: Most of the marketing and sales related discussions within the
customer and internal teams flow into EMail and some into phone calls.
Tracking Emails and Voice calls is difficult to get the entire information on
demand. Traditional CRM software only keeps the structured information
not the discussions happened with multiple people involved in the overall
engagement. When the engaging marketing employee leaves the company,
the problem is worse as all this information is lost and becomes difficult to
new marketing staff to take over from where it was left.
o Challenge: Can I collaborate with customers and internal staff effectively
on all Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Issues etc?
Reason: The sales order is the result of multiple iterations on end
product/service delivery involving hard negotiations. Also the required
information to make this decision has been taken from multiple people with
in the organization. Can I’ve all this un-structured information has to be
tied together for each sales order level and purchase order level.
o Challenge: Internal Project Management needs Customer inputs and is this
collaboration possible and transparent?
Reason: Most of project management systems are tied to process
workflows. Support only structured information and flat files for
information exchange. They basically emit state changes as events as
emails. They don’t help you to discover interested content nor have rich
experience to share among employee networks. A new user joins the
project, he has to be added to all required tickets he may work on. How
good it would be if there is software that can push all tickets he may work
on joining the team?
o Challenge: How to broad cast information to organization wide and
department wide or in fact to a specific interested group effortlessly?
Reason: Traditionally this is achieved as sending mails either using mailing
lists in organization or with contact groups in email client like Microsoft
Outlook. Maintaining contact groups by each individual is difficult and
need modifications frequently as time passes by. If any new individual joins
the group, then he has no chance of knowing what happened earlier. How
good if everyone in the organization has access to these contact groups and
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7. send messages effortlessly and Contact groups keep updating themselves
over time
Importance of CRM Software Solution
Many organizations follow the motto “Customer is King”. This is essential for
organization success in the market. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
software helps in maintaining all the customer related information and helps
managing customers servicing as well as sales and marketing processes.
Benefits of CRM system implementation include
o Better Customer Knowledge – maintain all customer information that is
required together for easy processing including contact information,
opportunities, leads, sales orders, accounts etc
o Better Marketing efforts – leads and prospects comes at various stages and
they are to be converted into customers. Also let targeted customers
informed about new products/services by campaigns and surveys.
o Customer Acquisitions and Retentions – attract new customers and close
deals quickly through efficient responses; cross selling where possible to
existing customers by understanding needs and building loyalty.
o Market Segmentation and Targeting – helps bigger marketing and sales
teams to target markets that may be segmented geographically, small
medium enterprises, industries (like retail, healthcare, insurance etc)
o Customer analysis – customer data from sales order history and contacts
can be mined to arrive at better sales and market projections
o Better Customer Service – Customers are better informed and a platform
for them to submit orders and track delivery, raise issues, request support.
o Cost Reduction – As customers can access latest information, reduces
phone and personal contacts expenditure to organization.
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8. CRM software helps maintain all the customer information:
o Leads: A Lead is not a customer yet but a person or organization or
company that may be interested in our organization products and/or
services. A lead can be generated from internally by our sales team or
customer approached directly.
o Prospects: A qualified lead is a prospect where in this lead has been
evaluated and found interested in procuring our products/services.
o Customers: The recipient who bought our product/services.
o Opportunities: An opportunity is a potential revenue-generating event. It
can be from existing customers or leads or prospects. There can be multiple
opportunities from same lead/customer.
o Accounts: An account is an individual or organization that has established
relationship with our organization. Includes Customers, Competitors, and
Partners.
o Contacts: An individual or influencer associated with an account or lead.
Capture phone, email and address information.
o Campaigns: A campaign is an outbound marketing project that has to be
planned and managed. It can include email, direct mail, print advertisement
etc. Leads, prospects, opportunities and accounts that resulted out of the
campaign are linked.
o Contracts: A written agreement between two or more parties
o Support Cases: A case is a detailed capturing of customer’s problems or
feedback or questions.
Some CRM software help you to mine this customer information to produce
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9. o Sales Forecasts
o Reports – aggregate summaries on volumes of leads, opportunities etc
o Analytics – analyze marketing team performance across different market
segments, geographies, time, and revenue growth.
Typical Use Cases to be addressed through CRM Software
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10. Technology Trends
The CRM Software applications evolved our time. It is still interesting for us to
see from where we started and we are heading to:
1. Typical office software served as Sales and Marketing tools. Spread Sheets
were used to manage (and also analyze) all customer information and Word
Processors to run campaigns. The problems include customer information
sharing across team members and across teams. Eg: Microsoft Office
2. Custom CRM applications built in-house as per the sales and marketing
processes. This gave transparency and reliable storage/availability/restricted
access across entire organization to sensitive customer information.
3. Then ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems evolved integrating
CRM processes into sales order management, inventory management,
supply chain management and financial management processes. These gave
360 degree view of how a customer has been served. But these are very
complex software that need customization for every deployment and very
expensive, suitable to larger organizations only. Eg: SAP, Oracle Siebel
4. The latest are SaaS (Software as a Service) CRM offerings. These offer
lower cost of ownership following “pay as you go” model, ideal for small
to medium organizations. These offerings continuously evolve and provide
integrations. Eg: SalesForce, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM,
NetSuite.
Benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS) CRM solution
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11. 5. The latest buzz is Social CRM – CRM software that has features of
offering social media services, techniques and technology to enable
organizations to engage with their customers. This is also called Social
Media Monitoring with technology to watch services like Facebook,
Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and
react accordingly. Eg: Radian 6. These may also support customer
communities managed by the organization themselves. Eg: Sugar CRM
with Qontext; SalesForce with Chatter.
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12. Evaluating CRM Software solutions in the market
Evaluating and choosing a CRM involves calculation and comparison of
o Cost of ownership VS Budget available
o Upgradation and Maintenance costs VS Budget
o Functionality VS Features needed
o Usability VS Training costs
o Availability including Mobile access
CRM Market for large enterprises can be excluded as they are present for long
time, might have their own CRM software built home grown or would have
customized through ERP systems. The major market of CRM software is the small
to medium enterprises (SME). Some of the popular software for SME market is
evaluated by well known Forrester research group is here.
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13. The major CRM functionality compared among popular products:
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14. The Social Collaboration
Social collaboration refers to processes that help multiple people interact, share
information to achieve any common goal. Such processes find their 'natural'
environment on the internet, where collaboration and social dissemination of
information are made easier by current innovations.
Sharing concepts on a digital collaboration environment often facilitates a
"brainstorming" process, where new concepts may emerge due to the contributions
of individuals, professional or otherwise. A crucial concept behind social
collaboration is that 'ideas are everywhere.' Individuals are able to share their
ideas, as it is not limited to professionals, but rather the general public who wishes
to become involved.
Social collaboration is related to social networking, with the distinction that social
collaboration is more group-centric than individual-centric. This is driven through
the principles of participation, collectiveness, transparency, independence and
persistence. Individuals put forward their ideas/thoughts/problems/opinions
independently. Others, who share similar ideas/thoughts, collectively participate in
contributing and nurturing them. The entire collaboration is persistent and
transparent to the entire community or group.
Purpose
Contribution
Results
Receives
Encourages
Community
Collaboration Feedback
Change Cycle
Builds
Creates
Judgement
o Groups also called networks are created for a specific purpose.
o Interested members join this group and start contributing.
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15. o Sometimes Organizations perceive interest cultivation exercises in bringing
people together.
o This contribution receives feedback in the form of comments and likes.
o Over a period of time, collective intelligence builds up and also few
community members are recognized as experts.
o Individuals start building their reputation and have more followers, building
relationships.
o These networks form virtual teams (away from actual organizational
hierarchy) and informally strive in accomplishing organization goals.
The Social Collaboration is required both in internal and external environments
Internal collaboration happens among employees of all functions including sales,
engineering, manufacturing/distribution, human resources etc. External
collaboration happens among partners, vendors, customers and prospects. Both
collaborations can be used effectively for efficient customer relationship
management.
Social Collaboration Tools
These are typical social collaboration tools that are used by Social Networking
sites like Facebook, Twitter for the open world initially. Now the Enterprise Social
Collaboration software has all these tools to engage communities for Enterprise
needs.
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16. o User Profiles – People keep their profiles up to date. Serves a employee
directory with all the contact information available
o Groups – Collobarate on specific purpose based on individual’s interests
building networks (or communities). Individuals can create groups and
invite others. Those new members invite few others. This gets into viral
and communities start building up in very less time.
o Discussion Forums – Discussion Forums help people discuss over a topic.
o Wiki – Helps adding content easily and collective editing.
o Blog – Publish content for others to read, like and comment.
o Create/Update/ Files with versioning – any kind of documents that are
needed to be shared as part of collaboration
o Photos, Videos
o Like – People can express their initial observation on the content item as
they like or unlike. Based on the number of likes indicates wide popularity.
o Follow – A part from liking, you may wanted to know what else is
happening on the content item say a blog. Now when start following any
one who comments on the blog you get notified. Similarly a group can be
followed to get notified on whatever happens with in that group. Similarly
following an individual lets you notified of what he is sharing with the
community
o Tagging – all related documents, discussions, wiki, photos can be tagged
with a name. The tag cloud helps to find popular stuff, so that more people
can follow them.
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17. CRM Collaboration Use Cases
Customer Relation Management involves all interaction points with customer that
includes Marketing, Sales and Support. In all these Social Collaboration tools can
help marketing and sales personnel to engage customers and internal staff
effectively. Find below the broad CRM use cases with helpful collaboration tools:
Out of the complete use cases we have, let’s discuss some cases where internal
and external collaboration happens at great length.
o Converting Leads
o Solving Customer Problems
We shall try look at them from software industry perspective. Let’s assume a
fictitious Software firm “Clear Sea Technologies (CST)” is offering software
consulting services. Let’s say a lead “ITC is looking for software consulting
services” has been generated from one of the partners say, “Red Sky Technologies
(RST)”. Now assume “Clear Sea Technologies” uses Social Collaboration
platform and is connected internally with all the employees and externally with all
partners and existing customers.
Note: Appendices D and E list out these Collaboration cases using Qontext
Software.
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18. Converting Lead “ITC” into Business Customer
.
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19. RST Manager logs on to CST collaboration platform and
sends a message to RST Partner Group. (This group members
are senior sales/marketing folks from both the RST and CST)
CST Marketing Manager quickly identifies looks for any
contacts in ITC. Mails the marketing and sales pitch to ITC.
CST Sales VP is following CST Manager
ITC Information Technology (IT) Manager responds to mail
asking what CST can offer. CST manager quickly creates ITC
Engagement group and invites ITC IT manager to it. He also
sends the company brochure documents and presentation
targeted to FCMG industry where ITC is in.
ITC IT Manager can quickly start the discussion by posting
RFC document. CST Marketing Manager needs to know
technical feasibility and hence creates a wiki page and invites
solution architect.
Solution architect with few of this team members captures the
technical capabilities and higher level effort and time
estimates on this wiki page.
CST marketing manager quickly creates a discussion with HR
Manager to check for any resource constraints. Prepares RFP
document and shared with ITC IT Manager.
ITC IT Manager negotiates terms with CST Manager.
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20. CST Sales VP following CST Manager gets to know the
current deal status and if favorable and makes final decision
on closing it.
The process won’t stop here even if the ITC lead goes into cold/lost state.
There won’t be loss to information even if the current CST marketing staff
changes. Serves as a loop back when CST marketing team try exploring
new opportunities in future based on already captured valuable information
on ITC requirements and business scope, new product/service offerings can
be targeted and intimated.
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21. Solving “ITC” Reported Issue
ITC IT Manager logs the issue into CST Defect/Issue tracking
system. This Defect tracking system is connected to
collaboration platform. So CST Manager associated with ITC
engagement gets to know that customer is facing problem.
CST Engineering team prepares a questionnaire to understand
the issue on the collaboration platform and invites ITC team.
ITC team answers the questionnaire that helps CST team
proceed with fixing the problem. In this process multiple
Debug and other log files are exchanged.
The CST team looks into relevant tagged items based on the
problem symptoms to find a quick solution
CST Marketing Manager is following the ITC customer and
the issue. If the issue resolution is expected to take longer than
SLA, then he steps in opens discussions with other higher
authorities in Sales, HR and Engineering teams to prevent the
loss of business.
CST Issue resolving team may get additional resources and
would deliver on time. At the end of the day, the ITC team
likes the delivery.
The ITC issue related discussion valuable understanding on defect, its nature,
test data, workarounds and solutions. All this information is in the form of
wiki pages, blogs, discussions, questionnaire will be tagged accordingly and
serves as future knowledge base.
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22. Recommendations and Conclusion
Social Collaboration has become viable to complement not only CRM use cases
but also to entire organization processes. Social collaboration won’t happen
automatically by employing a social collaboration software, but to be driven as an
organization strategy to leverage employees ideas and expertise collectively and
pro-actively. Involve outsiders like customers, partners appropriately in the total
value creation.
Social Collaboration can also lead to wastage of time if used for private purposes.
It may also spread unwanted information quickly among the organization. So
organizations should enforce a usage policy on controlling people to avoid
enterprise collaboration software for private reasons and also impose restrictions
on un-authorized content to be posted. Any such incidents have to be reported to
the Information Systems audit committee.
As the benefits of social collaboration are multiple, enterprises are inclined to
provide such productive tools to the employees and stakeholders. The familiar
usability of social features is attracting many enterprise software application
providers to either provide their own version of collaboration or hook into existing
enterprise collaboration players like Qontext.
Just like we have enterprise service bus that integrates all information systems
inside enterprise, similarly Qontext like social collaboration platform can link all
your enterprise information systems to acquire collaboration capabilities in the
present form without much investment. This takes the enterprise system a truly
integrated by the people, for the people approach.
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23. Appendix A: Qontext Enterprise Collaboration Software
Qontext portal is the gateway for enterprise collaboration. It has the necessary
Social collaboration tools. Find below the Quick Tour snapshot.
Qontext apps are available for all major mobile platforms like iPhone, Android
Qontext Platform Tools: Qontext mobile apps
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24. Appendix B: Qontext Collaboration inside SugarCRM
Qontext Social Collaboration software nicely embeds into SugarCRM software.
Find below the Qontext Portal page that is the gateway to collaborate and view
what is happening in your network.
Your collaboration Home
page is part of your CRM.
Keep track of all activities
across business objects.
220_1008 | January 24, 2011
Collaborate contextually at the record level – here all collaboration happening
around Opportunity Acme Corp
QuickPost provides
handy tools for instant
collaboration.
220_1008 | January 24, 2011
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25. Appendix C: SalesForce with Chatter
Chatter tab is the home for collaboration in your community
Collaborate at the record level – here all collaboration happening around
Opportunity “opp2”
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26. Appendix D: Collaboration during Lead Conversion
Clear Sea Technologies (CST), a fictitious IT Software services firm targeting ITC
software requirement needs from the lead information obtained through fictitious
Red Sea Consulting Technologies (RST), a consulting partner. The following
people are assumed to be working in these roles:
o Suresh – Marketing manager in RST
o Murthy – VP, Marketing and Sales, CST
o Akhil – Marketing Manager, CST
o Rajesh – ITC IT Manager.
CST is assumed to be using Qontext collaboration software. “RST Partner Group”
has been set up and invited marketing folks in RST. Now that RST team can
collaborate with CST team.
It also assumed that RST folks were doing market study on FMCG industry and
were closely monitoring ITC. As part of their research in improving ITC business,
they found ITC logistics need a better software. CST is their partner that can
address their current requirements. RST wanted CST to explore this opportunity.
The possible sequence of collaboration that can happen during this lead
conversion is captured with using Qontext Software
1) RST marketing manager, Suresh informs through their marketing CST about
opportunities in ITC.
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27. 2) RST marketing manager, Suresh informs through their marketing CST about
opportunities in ITC.
References
1. The Social Organization (How to use social media to tap the collective
genius our your customers and employees) – Anthony J Bradley, Mark P.
Mc Donald
2. Sales Force CRM software resources: www.salesforce.com
3. Sugar CRM software resources: www.sugarcrm.com
4. Qontext Collaboration: www.qontext.com
5. NetSuite ERP: www.netsuite.com
6. Wikipedia
7. http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/what-is-social-crm/
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28. 8.
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