Success with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 - Implementing Customer Relationship Management

The Value of Expanding CRM to Produce xRM Solutions (S. 27-28)

xRM solutions can be used to support custom business functions that were typically not included in the CRM implementation because of the cost and complexity of doing so. Businesses can use extensible data models and application frameworks to provide a wide variety of functionality. Take the following interesting examples that were undertaken with traditional CRM packages, and that would be very different as xRM solutions:

• Tracking details about a project sold to a customer with a related sales opportunity, potential service cases, and interaction with contacts throughout the organization. A customer may have multiple projects with unique relationships to customer information requiring a solution to manage more than a simple one-to-one structure. Solutions that provide the flexibility to support this complexity as well as the traditional CRM functions would be classified as xRM-capable.

• RMA management that tracks the products associated with a sales opportunity and service cases prior to the return and then allows the product to be added back into the inventory for sale to customers. The process is very prevalent in industries where demos or loaner models are sent into the field. This functionality has been designed with CRM applications many times over the years, but typically in a way that does not exactly meet the needs of the solution.

The challenge is tracking unique information for each product in the inventory and keeping a history of actions and activities related to the individual inventory item and the customer, service activity, and so forth. xRM solutions allow for the creation of the inventory item and the likely integration requirements to systems in manufacturing. The complexity of the relationships between information has not been well supported in CRM applications previously without a custom line-of-business development effort.

• Supporting customer satisfaction surveys associated with a specific customer, contact, and service case where the same customer and contact can respond to the survey questions for different service cases. This functionality requires a CRM solution to track many surveys for a single customer and to manage the different responses by individuals working for that customer. Also, different surveys can be defined depending on the need so the solution must be able to organize different questions and types into an active survey.

In past projects, We have seen this requirement met by custom-developed add-ons that exist outside the CRM application. With an xRM solution, these requirements can be met inside the application framework and the relationships managed similarly to other customer information. The architecture needed to support a CRM Suite that provides an application framework suitable for extensibility includes several components to be truly valuable beyond a customdeveloped application integrated with the solution.

Some of those components include an extensible data model for new entities, a web services integration approach, easy configuration of screens and workflow on top of the customized data model, and a role-based security model, to name a few. The architecture elements of a CRM-based xRM solution are suggested in Figure 1-16, along with common integration points to other business solutions.