Since its market debut in January 2003, Microsoft Dynamics CRM software, especially popular among the SMB crowd, has amassed more than a million users. In this month's special supplement, Birst makes its case for sales dashboards as a way for sales managers to better manage their pipelines and forecasts.

Themes include:
"Chart Your Course--Sales Dashboards Get You There Faster"
"Scribe Insight--The CRM Integration Tool of Choice for 10,000+ Organizations" 

In the following pages of our Best Practices Guide to Customer Experience Management, you'll notice a few reoccurring themes, which resonate from several of our experts' essays: 1) The importance of protecting and building your brand through CEM. 2) The crucial role of analytics, feedback, and knowledge management in the continuous process of improving your customers' experiences. 3) The imperative of adding social media to your integrated, multichannel strategy.

Tools that allow people and processes to create great customer experiences continue to evolve. Read the following essays to see how these tools can help your organization.

The first thing you need to do is to get a clear picture of your current reality. Who are your customers? Why are they buying--or not buying--from you? Most likely, you need to re-establish benchmarks to measure your progress. Clearly,understanding your customers, competitors, and your environment is the key to being able to accurately predict the future and consistently make competent decisions. Fortunately, customer analytics and business intelligence can help. In the following white paper, several experts in the fields of customer analytics and business intelligence offer their insights on how to combine these technologies with business processes to keep your business competitive and successful.

Themes in this issue:

-Discover the Power of Customer Interaction Analytics
-How Business Intelligence Empowers the Customer Relationship Marketer
-The Top 3 Best Practices For Improving Sales Performance
-Using Advanced Analytics
-Performance Management Applications Turbocharge Time to Value For Sales Leaders
-Business Intelligence; the Guitar, the Drum, the Microphone For the Sales Rock Star
-Six Ways to Help You Understand Your Customers: Past, Present, and Future

As self-service solutions have become the rule rather than exception to the rule, it is now critical not only to offer self-service solutions, but continue improving them to service today's impatient consumers, with heightened expectations, who will only continue to use self-service options if they remain quiker and easier to use, and resolve their needs without having to pick up the phone.

This Best Practice White Paper offers several perspectives and solutions to point you in the right self-service direction. Themes include:

"Egain Busts Five Self-Service Myths" (eGain)

"Stepping-Up Web Self-Service" (Astute Solutions)

"Enhancing the Customer Experience" (Parature)

It's no surprise that several of the following essays are squarely focused on producing or identifying or qualifying leads that are ready to purchase right now-or at least ones that can be easily nurtured until they are.

In sales, timing is--wait for it--everything. Being able to spot the right moment within the sales cycle to make the right type of contact can make the difference between helping a prospect pull the trigger on a deal or having them wish the gun were pointed at you instead.

This Best Practice White Paper has essays from five market leaders in Sales Management and Sales Productivity to address your pain points. Themes include:

"Finally, Marketing Automation that 'Gets' Sales" (Genius.com)

"Getting More From Your Marketing Efforts" (Marketo)

"Chart Your Course - Sales Dashboards Get You There Faster" (Birst)

"Upward Bound - Surefire Ways to Boost Sales Productivity" (Hoover's)

"What's the Secret in Getting Sales Reps to Adopt CRM? Use Their Commissions" (Varicent)

One of the trickiest areas of business processes to automate is Enterprise Marketing Management. It is no wonder that the tenure of the average CMO is less than two years.

In this latest installment of CRM magazine's Best Practices Series, we offer five separate insights from leading experts in the field.

"If a Customer Complains Online and you don't hear it, is it really a complaint?" (Avanade)

"The Customer Loyalty Playbook: 4 Steps to build Loyal, High-Value Customers" (Oracle)

"The New Revenue Engine" (Marketo)

"Six Success Factors for Building a Best-Run Marketing Organization" (SAP)

"Intelligent CRM Strategies for the SLOW-Growing Economy" (Infor)

Take a moment to download this latest BEST PRACTICES SERIES white paper from CRM Magazine and get the concise advice that you can incorporate into your corporate initiatives.

Gartner research, referenced in this white paper as part of Astute Solutions' essay, clearly shows customers are continually shifting their channel of choice from the phone to one of the other service delivery channels. There doesn't seem to be a single alternative channel that is replacing the traditional call center, which still accounts for roughly half of all interactions. Instead, all channels are picking up new users.

This shift has prompted this year's group of industry experts to suggest that organizations provide a consistent customer experience across those channels. The challenge lies in unifying all of these channels into a central repository available to all, including your contact center agents. Autonomy calls the central point of customer service operations a "relationship management center" and eGain dubs it a "customer interaction hub."

With more and more information coming in from nontraditional sources (read Lithium's piece, "Delivering ROI in the Contact Center with Social Knowledge"), managing and making sense of the data flow has never been more important or challenging. Fortunately, the big concepts that are offered this year (i.e., meaning-based computing, creating actionable intelligence, gaining deeper customer insights) are all within reach of most companies.

When we came up with the idea for this Best Practices topic, we expected many participating software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies to write about rapid deployments of tactical, non-IT intensive solutions. This is still the case, but their interests are much larger in scope. These vendors want people to know that their SaaS solutions have moved into a different phase of maturity and, as a result, are making their way into more large enterprises.

Still, as adoption of SaaS solutions become more widespread, integration and customization challenges, especially at larger companies, exist. This new Best Practices White Paper discusses integration issues as well as several other Cloud Computing / SaaS themes such as:

-Contact Centers in the "Cloud" For Better Customer Service
-Compelling Benefits of Cloud-Based Business Intelligence
-Enterprise SaaS Solutions
-How to Avoid Cloud Data Disaster
-And more...

DOWNLOAD NOW FOR FREE!!!!! 

In this white paper you'll be treated to three distinct strategies that you can use to form relationships with prospects and past customers with lead nurturing campaigns, interact with them using their preferred touch points, and engage them with social networks in a measureable way.

If there is one thing that marketing and sales agree on, it is that customers are forming their prejudices and favorable attitudes much earlier in their decision-making process. As a result, our companies have to do a much better job of timing messaging to fit the new sales cycle.

Some of the themes in this issue are:

-Demand Generation and Social Media
-Lead Nurturing
-Going Beyond Email to Reach Buyers 2.0

Is your pipeline clogged with opportunities that never come to fruition? Does your lead-scoring or nurturing process leave your sales team out of the process? Does your slimmed-down technology staff need help with integration issues to move a key project forward? These and other solutions, from critical reporting to marketing automation to predictive analytics and more, can be found in the following pages and on the AppExchange site. With over 800 applications available for download, and more than 175 services, a business user need only identify a particular pain point to start investigating Salesforce.com AppExchange solutions.

Some themes you will learn about in this white paper:

--Enterprise-Class Cloud Integration
--Meeting Sales Quotas in Tough Markets
--Marketing Automation
--Analytics On Demand
--On-Demand Business Intelligence

Knowledge management initiatives have been proven to deliver ROI and a range of significant benefits for customer service and support organizations, including increasing staff efficiencies, delivering cost savings, flexible content access, collaboration, analytics, improving customer satisfaction, and much more.

Knowledge-driven CRM has emerged as one of the few sustaining differentiators companies utilize for cocmpetitive advantage. By focusing on a few of these key "Best Practices" offered up in this white paper from InQuira, eGain and Consona CRM, all market leaders in Knowledge Management, your organization can optimize the benefits of a well-thought-out knowledge management initiative and start enjoying the benefits of this technology sooner rather than later.

We all know that the key to driving user adoption-of any technology-is having benefits that users themselves actually recognize. For many, the concept of mobile CRM is all about personal convenience, mutual efficiency, and business productivity. But other users require other benefits: Field-service providers, sales personnel, and mobile workers of every ilk continue to demand universal access and increasingly powerful solutions that allow them to focus on their core concerns, not the mechanics of connecting to information.

This month's Best Practices report offers three different perspectives on how to best implement mobile CRM solutions throughout your organization. Although there may be differences of opinion when it comes to specific tactics or approaches, no one can dispute the importance of having an overarching strategy toward your mobile CRM initiative. That strategy--and the technology it leads you to--will help you make your organization more responsive to the mobile needs not only of your customers, but those of your partners, prospects, and employees.

How can you harness the total power of social media with return-on-investment (ROI) metrics that satisfy your CEO? Download this free white paper and find out how to "Drive Sales Effectiveness with Enterprise-Ready Web 2.0Solutions," "Harvest Social Knowledge for Customer Service," and learn how "Social CRM Turns Customers into Competitive Advantage."

What does your company recommend as a strategy?

Many of the early CRM vendors who started out in specific market segments soon found themselves boxed in, with no place to grow. On the flip side, broader CRM solution providers soon began developing expertise in a whole range of markets, and found they were able to transfer that knowledge quickly to new customers. Much of the value proposition that prospects were looking for amounted to having the vendor answer one question: "What kind of experience have you had working with companies like mine?"

In this special section of CRM magazine, we’ve asked vendors to highlight what their companies do particularly well, so that you can benefit from their specific expertise and experience. The result? Six very different solutions ranging from leveraging social data in the enterprise to productivity solutions that every salesperson can benefit from.

CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND E-COMMERCE—could there be a more natural combination? In many ways, e-commerce applications, such as the online storefront, are great examples of CRM theory put into practice. Your storefront is like a laboratory, with the aspects of sales, marketing, customer service, and analytics all there to be adjusted, without the unknown variable of employee quality to contaminate the results.

Creating strong relationships with customers online—and, ideally, expanding those relationships to include offline customer interactions—presents special challenges, but new technologies are making it possible. In this White Paper, five leading vendors offer their insights on how to maximize your online channel.

Consumer’s expectations and the advent of broadband accesshave altered the way we interact with our customers and howthey expect to interact with us. People want product information24/7, want to place orders, track shipments, resolve problems, and getsupport at a time and through any channel of theirchoosing. In a very short period of time the expectations ofcustomers for good service and access to information hasmade instant access a true competitive advantage for SMBs.This white paper examines SMB solutions that offer clear businessvalue and complement—not compete with—the resources needed by thecompany’s core business.

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