Siebel CRM Overview

Siebel CRM provides what is probably the most powerful, highly-functional customer relationship management platform for businesses of all types and sizes. It is part of the Oracle suite of CRM solutions, and has been installed in over 4,000 companies around the world. The suite has an application for almost all your needs, but it's size can be both an advantage and a possible detriment for those looking to quickly implement a CRM solution.

It provides capabilities that can be made available to anyone in your company. The dashboard and reporting capabilities that can be made accessible to everyone, especially those involved in the customer value chain. Groups in sales, marketing, service and support staff, and third-party partners can all view the appropriate data and information they need for their customer support roles.

Siebel CRM also offers extensive business analytics, and can be deployed on-premise or as a Web-based, on-demand solution. Oracle's data base functionality is the basis for the application. It offers powerful and robust capabilities. Installation can be simple, rapid or it can be extensive and involved for larger deployments. Businesses can choose from a broad portfolio of applications and components to support every customer facing business need.

Modules and Applications

The Siebel CRM Sales module provides features for opportunity management, collaboration, forecasting, and mobile access, to help boost win rates and increase value to your customers. It integrates well with sales processes and methodologies, and provides excellent tools for pipeline management and reviews. It also has a module built to support channel partners which requires different considerations and functionality than a purely direct sales CRM.

The Enterprise Marketing module allows you to continuously test, measure, and get reports and feedback on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Marketing staff can leverage the information on individual customer needs and preferences to launch more successful events, email campaigns, and other marketing initiatives. The Call Center and Service application coordinates activities and optimizes resource utilization across various customer support channels, such as call centers, field service teams, and help desks.

There is a Self-Service and eBilling module that provides customers with a convenient way to get direct access to services that are important to them which can be accessed at any time, from any location where web connectivity is available.

The Customer Order Management provides the historical and real time information needed to help your company engage in up-sell and cross-sell initiatives. In addition it improves product bundling and allows for consistent pricing and discounting across your entire product offerings.

Siebel CRM Partner Relationship Management enables businesses to more effectively manage their alliance networks and improve collaboration and information sharing with key partners. Partner account ownership and customer rules add an additional level of complexity to CRM applications, which Siebel handles very well.

Positives

Siebel probably has the potential to give your company more functionality and visibility to your customer facing operations than any other CRM system. There have been hundreds of successful integrations around the world and there are numerous system integrator companies that do an excellent job implementing Siebel.

Considerations

The potential of what Siebel can do for your company is often intoxicating, but be careful of biting off too much at once. The impact the Siebel can have on your business operations, IT and budget has the potential to slow your operations down before you see the ROI you are expecting. Start with critical areas first and ramp up over time to minimize any negative consequences of a huge all at once deployment. This makes sense for any CRM implementation.

Conclusion

If you are looking to leverage information that you can link and share real-time across all company systems that contain customer information, Siebel is a good choice. It offers an extensive number of applications and options, and it comes with excellent support and a long history of best practices and knowledge.

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