The current tough economic scenario has made Oracle's CRM On Demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) or “cloud computing” based customer relationship management (CRM) solution a very attractive option for enterprises, according to Sathya Prasad Rai, Oracle senior director for CRM On Demand, Asia.

“That's because CRM On Demand requires no upfront investment, can be implemented in two to three weeks and lets customers reap its business benefits within a short time,” said Prasad in Kuala Lumpur recently.

Also over the past few years, Oracle has come up with enterprise-class social CRM applications which draw upon the key success features of social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and others and has applied them to CRM On demand to make it much more user friendly, relevant and and useful to sales staff in terms of their ability to collaborate online with colleagues and in communicating with customers.

“Some of our social CRM applications include Sales Prospector, Sales Library, Sales Campaign and Oracle Deal Management – all of which are SaaS-based applications available on subscription from Oracle,” Prasad added.

Oracle can also implement CRM on Demand and social CRM solutions on customer premises, where they require to store their data on their own systems.

CRM on the road

Extending relevant functions of its PC-based CRM On demand to sales and marketing executives and after sales service staff in the field, Oracle introduced its Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant application which lets them access key sales and customer information on their Apple iPhone or RIM Blackberry device in the field.

Users just need download the Mobile Sales Assistant client from the Apple Store or for long term use, they can subscribe from Oracle and similarly for a Blackberry device.

Oracle also provides analytical CRM to help business executives gain insights into their business and to make decisions.

“Mobile Sales Assistant provides business value to an executive in a very easily accessible manner,” said Prasad.

For example, its Sales Forecast application shows the deals an executive is currently working on, their potential value, the probability to close each deal based on data stored on the CRM On Demand database at the back end.

Executives can also see all potential deals on their iPhone or Blackberry, their total potential revenue based on their probability of closure and each possible deal's target close-by date. It lets them look up the current status of each sales quotation and which potential deals to focus on to meet their quota.

They need just click on a contact and Mobile Sales Assistant shows its location using Google Maps on the device and the executive can click on a phone number in a contact to call it.

It also lets sales representatives share contact and lead information with other team members, other colleagues or contacts, coordinate meetings and calls with an account team or customer contacts with a few clicks.

Instead of having to scroll and click through lists of data as on a PC, Mobile Sales Assistant's rich yet simple task-focused user interface lets sales persons find relevant information at a glance and quickly complete important activities with a few clicks. It also enables one-click access to recent and frequently viewed items.

Integrated contact, account and calendar management capabilities within a single user interface lets users easily retrieve and update key customer information, manage appointments, tasks and notes in real time without synchronisation, since it communicates with the back-end CRM On Demand system in real-time over the cellular network, instead of first having to synchronise the data on their device with their notebook PC.

However its store-and forward capabilities enable its use beyond network coverage.

“While Social CRM overall (desktop and mobile) is still very new, enthusiasm for it is faily high due to their ability to deliver tangible results for business in terms of insights for sales and marketing executives,” said Prasad.

Enthusiasm in Malaysia is also high, especially from banks, insurance companies, increasingly from telcos, manufacturers and small-to-medium scale businesses (SMBs).

“Our applications are very light for use over the Internet and they are used in places like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, so lack of wide availability of large bandwidth is not a major issue,” Prasad added.

CRM On demand Release 16 is Oracle's latest version, the new features of which include improved support for organisational best practices, increased flexibility and process agility, deeper CRM features to support the work functions and flow in specific industry verticals and greater customisability.

It also supports eight more languages – namely, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Thai and Traditional Chinese in addition to the ten languages supported by the earlier version, as well multi-currency capabilities.