Understanding mobile customer relationship management

Here at OutlookPower Magazine, we like to bring you information straight from leading experts on various email and communications-related topics. This week, I had the opportunity to interview James Wong, co-founder and president of Avidian Technologies (at http://www.avidian.com), a company that makes Prophet 2004, an interesting contact and sales management product for Outlook.

He recently released a new product that synchronizes Outlook and Palm handhelds with his sales management information. I've known James for quite some time and he knows a tremendous amount about the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) market. Here's what he had to say about mobile CRM.

Please introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at Avidian.

My name is James Wong. I am the co-founder and president of Avidian Technologies, developers of Prophet 2004. I am responsible for creating a great company based on our founding principles as well as driving the business strategy.

Before we can talk about handheld versions, it's important to understand both CRM and Prophet. So, first, can you explain what CRM is, and why it's important?

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, is broadly defined as the business process of understanding, collecting and managing all of the information in a business environment relating to a customer. The goal of CRM is to more effectively communicate with customers and improve customer relationships over time.

CRM is important because, when it works, it allows a business to speak with a customer with full information at any point in the relationship. The customer and their needs become the center of the conversation versus having a department by department focus which forces the customer to navigate the organization. A company can solve problems more quickly, create and close sales opportunities more quickly and solve customer issues more readily.

Can you give us a feel for how the CRM business breaks out? Is it all big business, all small companies, some sort of client/server world, or what?

CRM is a way of doing business that extends from a single transaction, like a lemonade stand, all the way to a highly complex sales, delivery and support relationship, like an airplane. Obviously, the more complex the product, service, interaction with the customer, the more touch points and the more information there is to organize and coordinate.