What this book covers

Chapter 1, What is CRM?, explores the roles, views, and responsibilities of project members, since CRM matters to everyone in a company and all staff members need to feel the sense of ownership right from the beginning of the CRM journey, though everyone plays a different role in this journey and has a different view of CRM. I will list briefly the important elements of a CRM system, including the operational CRM, analytical CRM, and collaborative CRM. We will also look at five real-life case studies of CRM implementations to compare how the particular business pain points and company strategies will shape functional priorities for your CRM design.

Chapter 2, Getting to Know Your Customer, helps in understanding the customer by maintaining and managing relevant customer information, which is at the heart of any successful business. Customer knowledge is perhaps the most essential ingredient to a business being successful. Knowing the customer starts with building a sophisticated 360-degree customer view that can capture, process, and present all relevant relationship data in a single role-based 360-degree client view. You will be introduced to a real-life solution of building a comprehensive 360-degree client view from one of the author's partners that he has been working with in many projects and in different countries, which is VeriPark, a very successful CRM company operating globally.

Chapter 3, Conceptualizing the CRM Design from Business Requirements, explores the design elements of a modern CRM solution that are dictated by business requirements, including processes, applications, data, security, integration, and deployment decisions. We will walk through the process of design and will recommend some very simple tools that could help you manage the design process for your new CRM solution.

As CRM provides a good opportunity for your digital transformation, we will explore the five technologies that are the basic ingredients of a digital transformation and essential for a modern CRM solution, including two case studies of successful digital transformation. This chapter will also provide you with a comprehensive overview of the design elements at a high level and set the stage for the next chapter.

Chapter 4, Architecting Your CRM Solution – Preparing for Today and Tomorrow, looks at the work of CRM architects, exploring techniques in architecting a business solution that could solve the business challenges of today and tomorrow. This chapter is not only for architects but also for all technical team members including consultants, project managers, and developers. It could also be relevant to key sponsors in the business departments. We will cover the major elements of solution architecture such as the viewpoints, quality attribute trees, measurement metrics, and architecture trade-off techniques. We will start briefly exploring some of the software engineering techniques—only as much as is relevant to the CRM architecture—including the so-called Agile development methodology, as this methodology is proving to be the most efficient in designing and implementing business solutions in the light of recent technology innovations.

Chapter 5, Utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Your CRM Strategy, explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) could support your CRM processes and enrich traditional business applications to enable higher process automation and better business outcomes. We will bring a few real-life examples of implementations showing how these newer technologies including AI, ML, speech recognition, image recognition, pattern recognition, and cognitive services could be embedded in customer processes to provide self-service and automated customer interactions, and deliver recommendations and personalized customer experiences at an affordable price.

Chapter 6, GDPR and Regulatory Compliance, explores how a CRM platform could be leveraged to support and implement regulatory compliance in general and a real-life General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implementation with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to illustrate the practical use of the CRM platform.

GDPR is a regulation in European Union law on personal data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union. All global businesses that are dealing with European Union users and European Union clients are affected by this law. GDPR was adopted by the European Parliament on 27th April, 2016 and has been enforceable throughout the European Union since 25th May, 2018. GDPR regulates the collection, storage, use, and sharing of personal data for all businesses dealing with European Union clients. In this chapter, we will take you through the design proposal for implementing GDPR on your CRM platform.

Chapter 7, CRM Integration Strategies, explores most common data integration factors such as business requirements, related technologies, and stakeholders in CRM integration projects because building a 360-degree client view and enabling end-to-end customer processes often requires integration with various legacy applications and different data sources. Many factors such as security, performance, quality, and portability need to be considered in your integration strategies and in your solution design. We will explore various integration techniques, implementation scenarios, initial data load, and some of the performance considerations for your design. A modern CRM platform should integrate with an ever-growing eco-system in the cloud in order to consume data and leverage other services in the cloud, such as AI, social media platforms, and data lakes, to build a comprehensive customer view or to enable social selling and social advertising. We will also set the stage for the last chapter of the book, Chapter 9, CRM Differentiators, where we will explore the platform capabilities that are essential to integrate with the cloud.

Chapter 8, Cloud Versus On-Premise Versus Hybrid – The Deployment of a CRM Platform, explores factors such as the options and services that are available to you, regulatory compliance, security, portability, how and when you can access your data, who is responsible for keeping your solution safe, and obviously the overall cost of the CRM system, including the money you spend to buy, maintain, and operate, as well as any other ongoing costs (Capex/Opex). These are the factors directly influencing your choice of platform and the hosting of your solution since how you choose to host your CRM application can significantly impact the cost and functionalities of the solution. We will also evaluate the pros and cons of cloud, on-premise, and hybrid deployment.

We will explore CRM deployment options and compare them with each other to provide you with some good tools to help your decision-making processes regarding your CRM deployment.

Chapter 9, CRM Differentiators, shows that the competition among the market leaders is not going to be about a feature list anymore, as the functionalities of the most available tools in the market are continuously improving and are on par with major vendors such as Microsoft and Salesforce.com. The differentiators between the vendors will be more about how the CRM platform is able to leverage the broader technology innovations that are evolving today with the smart cloud, such as big data, AI, ML, and cognitive services. In this last chapter of this book, we will explore how the CRM platforms available in the market today can provide you with some powerful options and services that are usually ignored or neglected during the platform selection process. We will explore some significant capabilities of the CRM platforms that are needed to enable a sustainable solution for the long run.

We will talk about the elements and characteristics that make a successful CRM implementation in today's market environment. We will not compare CRM products explicitly but will explore the eco-system a new CRM platform should provide in order to solve the business challenges of today and tomorrow.