by Prasad Rai, Senior Director, CRM On Demand, ASEAN and India, Oracle Asia-Pacific

The business case for mobile customer relation management (CRM) is compelling. Time is precious in a sales cycle. Today’s sales professionals spend an ever-increasing amount of time away from the office while juggling multiple deals, and they need to complete frequent tasks involving customer information in CRM, while only using their mobile device. There are mobile workers proliferating in organizations who are away from their desks more than 20% of their work week! Some reports predict that mobile CRM will grow to 20% of total CRM revenues by 2010.

Organizations are increasingly demanding anywhere, anytime applications to empower decision makers with mission critical information at their fingertips. Employees need to be connected 24X7 and need access to data in real time regardless of their location. Mobile CRM can enable users to become more effective and productive through easy-to-use, focused collaborative applications tailored to their mobile devices.

There are niche mobile-only CRM vendors as well as traditional CRM vendors that have explored offering mobile extensions. In general, these offerings require heavy customization, and have not provided sufficient ease-of-use and simplified device interoperation.  The result is that most mobile CRM solutions to date have not delivered in practice on the promise of mobile CRM.  

Consider the typical inhibitors to mobile CRM uptake. Firstly, the effort, cost and therefore risk incurred by organizations to customize and deploy mobile CRM; secondly, the ease-of-use of the application; and finally, the solution’s inability to work natively with the various devices to truly provide practical value.

Most mobile applications fail to consider the unique qualities of devices, and that mobile work styles are different than when in front of a desk. Many mobile solutions today mimic desktop counterparts. Salespeople don’t need a desktop application repurposed for a mobile device! They need an application that is designed specifically for a mobile device and for their mobile work style.  But unfortunately, sales representatives are hindered by a number of challenges in many of today’s mobile tools that result in low adoption and value.

Mobile CRM tools should address all of these issues by providing a standards based, intuitive solution, with out of the box value and usability designed specifically for mobile use and devices and not simply as an extension of desktop CRM.  For example:

•    instant setup with no required customization.
•    a simplified focus on common sales activities with an intuitive icon-driven approach.
•    seamless interoperabilty with devices.
•    data location irrelevance.

To illustrate these last two points: users should be able to easily work with data (contacts) and with all the same phone features (click to dial,) whether the data lives within CRM or on the device or both. The goal should be to make data location irrelevant for the user: they should not worry whether the contact exists on device only, in the CRM system only, or in both via synchronization. This removes confusion and data freshness issues that are commonly associated with the asynchronous data synching paradigms in common use today.

The tool should have flavors for the popular phone models, such as the Blackberry or iPhone. It should be optimized for sales folks with a rich but simple, streamlined and very intuitive features; abilities to collaborate with colleagues and customers, complete frequent tasks and close deals more quickly while mobile. In contrast to browser-based mobile CRM solutions, this tool should in itself be a rich (Java) client application that also supports offline usage because access to the network is not always guaranteed. The Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant for both BlackBerry and iPhone platforms, delivered as a Software-as-a-service (Saas), is one such tool.

Best practices and processes for mobile CRM

CRM implementations should have executive commitment and focus on practical business result and internal processes to be successful. While companies invest in best-of-breed front, back office and mobile applications to streamline critical business processes for a particular function, if these offerings operate in their own silos, there will be productivity issues, data quality problems, and reduced business effectiveness.

Here are some considerations:
1)    What devices are my employees currently using?
2)    What few things do my employees need to be able to do while mobile?
3)    How do mobile employees need to collaborate?

Best practices include:
1)    Keep it simple: focus on top few processes that will bring greatest value.
2)    Don’t over customize in order to avoid high complexity and cost, and low adoption.
3)    Use a mobile solution provided by same CRM vendor or standards based to ensure interoperability, consistent UI/standards, vendor accountability and investment protection.
4)    Blend in collaborative and other third party mobile services for expanded value.

On this last point there is widespread use of mobile social tools and these can be leveraged as part of the mobile CRM experience. In sales prospecting, for example, third party social networks, blogs, RSS feeds, instant messaging and other web services can be leverage in-context to CRM data to ensure that mobile employees have a broader and deeper understanding of their customers.

Measuring ROI for mobile CRM applications depends on the use case but typical ROI drivers include:
1)    X% more time spent with customers leads to Y% increase in sales
2)    More timely action taken on leads results in higher lead to opportunity conversion ratios and ultimately more sales.
3)    Increased and timely collaboration with rest of organization means more up-selling and less customer defection as higher level of sales service and relationship handing become enabled.

We believe that the possibilities behind mobile CRM can resonate with mid-sized organizations and Oracle’s standards based approach is ideal for mid-size companies, enabling them to start simple and move at their desired pace in developing their technology infrastructure with no throw away.  They can even start with specific functionalities they want to actualize on a software-as-a-service model such as Oracle CRM On Demand, and be able to smoothly integrate with a more comprehensive on-premise CRM system as they expand and grow more successful – all without having to change the Mobile CRM component.