The Hindu Business Line : Monitor your customer's value

Customer relationship management can help you please your customer - and the latest technology can also prevent your employee from taking things easy at work. Read up on the nuts and bolts of CRM.

THE most critical factor in CRM or Customer Relationship Management is that it helps you monitor the value of each of your customers, explains Dhruv Nath in a fun book titled The Nuts & Bolts of CRM, from Tata McGraw-Hill (www.tatamcgrawhill.com) .

Through stories and pictures, dialogues and jibes, Nath aims to engage the toughest customers for his book, and yet manages to give some serious inputs such as defining CRM as "the business process an organisation goes through, in order to identify, select, acquire, develop, and retain its most profitable customers, to serve them better."

The tech interface starts with the call centre - to permit the customer to get in touch with the business from wherever he is, and whenever he wants.

But there you meet Monica with the most highly polished nails of all, because she has a lot of spare time during office hours!

Monica always comes in "a few minutes early and occupies the last seat," because she knows that the EPABX (Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange) starts with the first seat when searching for a free agent to take the call.

However, now the gizmo is getting smarter as ACD (automatic call distributor), as Nath points out. ACD can keep track of the time spent by each agent on the phone during the day and allocate each call, as it comes in, "to the agent who has spoken the least (assuming of course, she's free), or to the agent who has had the longest break since the last call."

Nath introduces you to database tables in 3NF or the 3rd Normal Form where customer details are captured; however, normalisation should not slow down the process of querying.

To run a campaign, carry out a customer satisfaction survey, or to remind your customers of their bills, you can put an outbound call centre to use.

Which leads the discussion to EMA or Enterprise Marketing Automation, with Nath first drawing a `work-flow automation' chart. You'd learn how to "maintain and manage lists of potential customers and filter these lists so as to shortlist people to target for a campaign."

Robots aren't salesmen yet. However, you can think of Sales Force Automation, SFA, with its three major components, as explained by the author.

These are: account management to keep track of and manage companies you deal with, contact management focussing on the people, and opportunity management to help manage the sales process.

The organisation chart that the CRM software stores within it need not be dumb; you can teach it politics too!

"It tells you who the decision maker is, and also who influences this decision, without actually making it. It may give you the names of various people who have to be involved in the decision-making process, or even the purchase amounts that each of them have the power to sanction." And, it may also know who is at loggerheads with whom.

After wrapping part one of the book devoted to the operational part with Internet eCRM, Nath takes up `analytical CRM' that the management uses to analyse the data for better decision-making.

Enter then `the data warehouse', but not before you know about OLTP, short for On-Line Transaction Processing, and realise the need to keep databases separate for analytics.

Then, there are data cubes and OLAP, or On-Line Analytical Processing, for you to lap up.

A survival guide if you find your CRM consultant too confusing to carry on with!

Obscurity does not provide security

THERE'S a `controversial question' about the name, informs M. Tim Jones in GNU/Linux Application Programming, from Dreamtech Press (www.wileydreamtech.com) .

Why is it called GNU/Linux instead of the simpler name Linux? "The answer is simple," he writes. "Linux refers to the kernel or the core of the operating system, which was initially developed by Linus Torvalds. The remaining software - the shells, compiler tool chain, utilities and tools, and plethora of applications - operate above the kernel. Much of this software is GNU software."

Since the source code that makes up GNU/ Linux OS dwarfs that of the kernel, it would be a misnomer to call the entire OS Linux, opines Jones.

"GNU/Linux has evolved from its humble beginnings to be one of the most scalable, secure, reliable, and highest performing operating systems available," extols Jones with the help of a timeline of the software's development.

Also, compared to Windows, GNU/Linux has proved to be less vulnerable to hacking, you'd learn. Open source Apache HTTP server is considered safer than Web servers.

If you are worried whether or not Linux supports devices, Jones explains that almost half of the Linux kernel source files are devoted to device drivers.

"This isn't surprising, given the large number of hardware devices out there, but it does give you a good indication of how much Linux supports."

For those interested in making free software available, the author suggests SourceForge and Freshmeat as popular means to make your offering to the Internet community.

These are also "meeting places for free software developers" who come together "to build software that is both useful and free to the wider community" because they believe that obscurity does not provide security.

In the free software field, GPL or General Public Licence is popular. It provides users with three basic rights, viz: "Right to copy the software and give it away; right to change the software; and right to access the source code."

Ensure that when you give away, source code is made available. "This is what's called `tainting' effect of GPL software," writes Jones. "What `touches' GPL software becomes GPL software."

But open source development has its problems too. One, you've to get your hands dirty unless you're prepared to wait for new releases; remember that the early GNU/ Linux was not for the faint-hearted.

Two, documentation. Three, ego; this may be "a key reason for the failure of many open source projects more than technical failings," as Jones puts it. And four, `fanaticism' that can take focus away from the real issues.

"One can use both Windows and Linux and lead a full and productive life. It's not an either/or argument, it's more about the best tool for the job," is Jones's counsel.

A well-written guide.

Tailpiece

"I'm sure he's using a new swear word!"

"What's that?"

"You, SB!"

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
Let's negotiate

No let-up in sight

Hear me?

RDX — for mind-blowing cinema

The key: 10 lines of code