Wireless E-CRM

Looking for elusive ROI in all the right places

by David Butler, September 18, 2001

Promoters of wireless products and services have promised many advantages to companies adopting such technology for CRM. However, in today's economic climate, organizations need to focus on overall return on investment (ROI) to find benefits for wireless implementations. When organizations don't deploy wireless e-CRM technology, their field service costs can be greater than if they had implemented a wireless solution.

For example, about a week before the season finale of The Sopranos, I called the cable TV division of my cable provider. I wanted the cable company to eliminate the excessive noise I was experiencing before the much-anticipated final show.

As I was talking to the customer service agent I noticed one of the company's cable trucks parked in my San Jose, Calif. neighborhood. I asked if they could radio the truck to stop by my home and save a trip. The agent said that's not the way they do things. So I had to schedule an appointment for later in the week, forcing the cable company to roll a separate truck for my service call.

While my local cable service provider had not implemented a wireless solution for its field service staff in San Jose in spring 2000, Amazon embraced the wireless world in 1999 when it introduced its Amazon Anywhere strategy that lets consumers make purchases via wireless devices. Food.com announced in September 2000 a wireless solution that would allow consumers to browse restaurants and order prepared meals using their favorite wireless device. Amazon recently announced that it is scaling back its in-house wireless efforts in the United States, although the company has formed alliances with providers such as AT&T Wireless. Food.com has also redeployed its resources to focus on its main Web site.

The Gartner Group estimates the market for wireless e-CRM solutions will reach $900 million in 2002. However, if consumers don't have a compelling need to order the latest John Grisham novel from Amazon or Tuscan Pot Roast from Food.com using their wireless application protocol (WAP)-enabled cellular phone or Palm VII, where's the ROI within the wireless world? This article examines ROI factors useful for justifying a move to wireless e-CRM within your organization and also looks at how companies can improve customer relations for field staff already equipped with wireless technology.

Supporting Field Staff

Paul Greenberg, executive vice president of Live Wire Inc., an e-commerce consulting firm, and author of the popular book, CRM at the Speed of Light: Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time, (Osborne-McGraw Hill, 2001) said, "Field force automation is immediate, you are out there solving a problem, where that sense of immediacy is a problem, wireless e-CRM has value."

Greenberg is backed up by Brian Stone, director of product marketing at Siebel Systems Inc., who said, "The number one area where there is actually a business problem and significant return on investment is employee applications."

Stone defines "employee applications" as solutions that help automate sales and field service people.

FedEx Corp. has successfully implemented wireless e-CRM solutions for almost 20 years. With the solid backing of its entire executive staff, a key criteria for long term e-CRM success, the company saw the productivity of its couriers increase two and a half times when they rolled out the SuperTracker scanning system.

Couriers scan the packages they pick up using a FedEx-designed and produced handheld scanner. When the couriers get back to their trucks, they place the scanner into a docking station that sends the package information to their headquarters in Memphis, Tenn. and nearly instantaneously publishes the information to all of their customer touchpoints - call center, Web, and WAP-enabled applications. FedEx customers with Palm Computing or Microsoft Windows CE devices can track shipments using AvantGo Inc.'s Mobile Internet Service and AvantGo 3.0 software.

Transmitting Vital Information

Fred Smith, FedEx founder and chairman, explained why FedEx invested in getting package information to customers. "The information about the package is as important as the package itself," Smith said.

Customers have deemed that knowing where their package is within the FedEx system is vital information to them. Search for where vital information exists in your company because that's where you can find positive ROI for wireless e-CRM solutions.

Siebel's Stone said, "If you want to see a lot of ROI there should be some pain or problem that you are trying to resolve through realtime access to critical information."

There's that "vital information thing" again.

If your organization is thinking about launching a wireless e-CRM solution, the first thing you should do is forget about the technology and focus on the vital information you want to push to your customers or field staff. And a wireless e-CRM solution should not be your sole CRM solution, but should be one channel of your entire e-CRM solution.

Your organization should ask, "What is the business flow that I'm trying to fix irrespective of technology," said Jacob Cristfort, CTO of Oracle's OracleMobile division.

"Mobile wireless applications should always be part of bigger thinking around your business flows," Cristfort added.

Defining Goals and Metrics

The hardest part of e-CRM is not the technology, although the "e" in e-CRM does not mean "easy street" by any means. Establishing concrete business goals and the metrics needed to measure success is far more challenging. Decision makers focusing on technology for its "gee-whiz" factor are bound to waste scarce IT dollars and will probably fail because they wore technology blinders and didn't focus on customer and business requirements.

Sharon Ward, vice president of Enterprise Applications and CRM at Hurwitz Group believes defining what your business needs are before embarking on a wireless e-CRM project is the critical first step in discovering the final solution.

"The biggest problem [for organizations] is that they don't clearly define what they want," Ward said. And without a clear solution roadmap, you can't measure key metrics, feature creep sets in, and you can't deliver vital information to the customers or staff who need the data.

Productivity and Costs

Field service technicians like the ones who came out to fix my cable noise problems can be more productive and reduce costs to the organization by being connected to the main call and dispatch center. The more service calls per shift technicians can make while they are out in the field, the more productive they become.

When the FedEx courier uploads package information to the main IT host while in the field, the courier can also receive additional pickup calls via the screen attached to the upload cradle, thus increasing FedEx's field productivity and daily sales.

Cost issues are easily measured metrics that have always been part of successful organizations' strategic plans and are key metrics within wireless e-CRM solutions, too.

You can also find cost savings within a wireless e-CRM solution for the completion cost of field service, which helps technicians fix problems faster and generates customer goodwill. Wireless access to corporate knowledge resources can help field staff perform better, too.

Greenberg observed, "When field technicians have the ability to reach into the knowledge base of the company and find out what other technicians have done who have encountered the same problem in the past, customer satisfaction improves."

I wonder who will be first to call officials at my cable company with a wireless e-CRM offer they can't refuse - Siebel, Oracle, or maybe Tony Soprano?

David Butler has more than 15 years experience driving technology products and services from conception through launch.