Knoa Partners With Serene Corp. for CRM

Knoa Software, a vendor of experience and performance management software, has announced a partnership with Serene Corporation, which implements Siebel CRM. Knoa officials say the alliance is designed to help customers use Knoa’s technology and metrics and Serene’s Siebel-specific expertise "whether in a call center, operating service processes, or supporting a field sales force."

“CRM professionals cannot afford failed technology deployment projects, particularly in tough economic times when business survival may be at stake,” wrote Bill Band, vice president and principal analyst, Forrester (News - Alert), in the February 2009 report titled “How To Risk-Proof Your CRM Deployment Strategy.”

The report continues, “To pinpoint the real-world pitfalls that can trip up CRM initiatives, Forrester surveyed business and IT leaders at 133 organizations. The executives were asked, 'What were the major challenges in successfully implementing [CRM vendor solution] in your environment?' The companies we studied are all well-experienced with CRM initiatives; they typically had 30 months of deployment experience under their belts with a wide range of leading enterprise and mid-market CRM suite solutions."

 

As it turns out, Band wrote, "there are plenty of risks to worry about. In fact, respondents reported more than 200 individual problems with their CRM projects, encompassing 27 risk areas. These perils form the basis of Forrester's CRM project risk evaluation. Thirty-three percent of the problems reported were related to technology, 27 percent to business processes, 22 percent to people, and 18 percent to CRM strategy and deployment.”

The Knoa-Serene alliance is intended to help in end-user issue identification, officials of both firms say, since most CRM initiatives are "hampered from inception by insufficient visibility into the real impact of the end-user experience on performance." When bottlenecks are found with Knoa EPM, Serene’s consultants use the Siebel Performance Intelligence Toolkit to identify the root cause of the performance issues and provide recommendations for resolution.

Ajit Kumbhare, co-founder and managing partner of Serene Corporation, says that until recently, "there was no effective way to systematically capture meaningful data on the behaviors that drive service efficiency and productivity.”

Last year Knoa announced it signed a global agreement with SAP (News - Alert) AG through which SAP would resell Knoa's Experience and Performance Manager. 

 

 

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