Now playing: Teradata CRM 5.1

New capabilities for the customer-driven enterprise

by Michael O'Sullivan

Businesses never stand still, and neither should the applications designed to improve how businesses interact with customers. Since its inception more than four years ago, Teradata CRM has continually evolved to solve new problems, meet new needs and interact with new technology.

The new release, Teradata CRM 5.1, is ready to take customer relationship management to the next level. Sam Gragg, director, Teradata Customer Management Solutions Marketing, has more than a decade of experience in multiple dimensions of Teradata technology, sales, consulting and business development.

Gragg interacts closely with Teradata applications management teams and internal organizations, yet he remains very active with global clients, leading forums and sessions for Teradata CRM users at events around the world. Gragg also promotes the practice of CRM through programs at the Teradata Center for Customer Relationship Management at Duke University.

Teradata Magazine spoke with Gragg to discuss Teradata CRM 5.1 and the solution's current and future place in today's CRM market space.

Q. What's a realistic outlook for Teradata CRM, and what differentiates it from other CRM solutions?
A. No matter what anyone says or thinks about CRM, customers are still the center of every business, so we have every reason to be optimistic about the customer management space and the analytical tools that add value to customer relationships. Companies everywhere are starting to ramp up investments in technologies that support their core competencies, and all trends show customer intelligence to be a high priority.

What we're seeing is more interest than ever in understanding detailed customer behavior, which is one of the complexities driving business. That's why we see exploding interest in customer analytics, especially for enterprise-class customer management. It's one of the key drivers for our new release, Teradata CRM 5.1.

Companies need to engage individuals at every touchpoint with consistency and compelling value propositions. Today, the role of information technology is all about having data in one place for easy access by everyone across the enterprise so the data can be quickly exploited to drive revenue, manage costs and grow economic value. The key is being able to deliver the most relevant and effective content to customer touchpoints and enable your frontline associates to leverage it for a more satisfying and profitable customer engagement.

That's where I believe Teradata CRM has a clear advantage.We recognize that most company environments are complex; there may be multiple call centers, different technologies in different branches and stores-lots of variables. All of this makes it difficult to provide consistency, yet with Teradata CRM, we enable it.

We have a practical, powerful approach to information-driven business improvement. Most of our competitors bring in a departmental tool and plug it into a limited part of the business.We provide a broad tool and a practical way to help companies make money today while building on a foundation that will grow tomorrow.

Q. What is it that CRM customers really want? Are they buying a vision, an expectation, an application or a total solution?
A. They're buying components that address very specific problems: 'I need to improve the speed at which I develop campaigns.' 'I need to better integrate customer data with my channel delivery systems.' At the same time, what companies don't want to do is develop islands of automation or islands of solutions. They want a solution that can be integrated over time as it makes sense across the entire business.

Figure 1: Teradata CRM analyzes detailed data to create actionable customer intelligence, which drives a range of measurable, personalized marketing interaction across all channels. Click to enlarge

A few take the 'big bang' approach with an enterprise suite and try to implement it over a number of years. But our focus is based on successful data management. The option is to start building customer management capabilities in an incremental way, using components and features to mature your versatility over time (figure 1).

The other thing that companies want, I think, is not technical at all. They're looking for an enduring partnership with a strong vendor who can actually help them understand how to deploy CRM, realize more competitive advantage, make more money with the tools and evolve their capabilities over time.

They're buying something for today's problem, but they are also forming a partnership with proven intellectual capacity and a knowledge of the industry and the business. Teradata's real strength is bringing together database technology with applications like Teradata CRM and the experience of our industry consultants.

Q. How does Teradata CRM 5.1 build on previous versions of the solution?
A. Teradata CRM 5.1 is rooted in customer input and collaboration. Our clients basically asked us to take Teradata CRM to the next level, to improve ease of use and ease of management.We have a basic product road map, but our clients helped us prioritize what specifically would be of the most immediate value to them.

Advanced users said they wanted more CRM object sharing so that user groups could more easily share analytical results. Users also wanted more flexibility with recency limiting at multiple customer levels in complex campaigns. They asked for enhanced legend attribute ranges for more granularity in customer selection criteria. We added all of those features.

We also added an option where clients can get 30 different campaign performance reports and see in detail exactly what ROI and results each campaign generates. This feature complements a Teradata Professional Services engagement that customizes reports for our customers. Administrators asked for a way to monitor who's using the system and better manage user access and security, so we rearchitected the Security Manager interface. What's more, we enhanced the back-end data synchronization process functionality so that the back-end server data refresh is more highly automated. This provides faster access to new data and reduces overhead for systems management.

We also saw the need to provide better integration with other IT architectures. We moved the middle tiers to a Windows Services environment to make the system more secure and easier to manage.We certified the code for WebSphere to give our clients more options and to simplify solution interaction. Plus, we streamlined the process for batch scheduling and mail output.

Finally, we tightened our Teradata platform integration. Teradata CRM 5.1 leverages a database feature called Collect Statistics to perform quick table analysis, provide better table access, maximize query performance and facilitate processes. This allows users to get more work done in less time.

I'd say that these enhancements, together with major functionality additions in Teradata CRM 5.0 last year, strengthen the value proposition of the solution for both new and existing clients. They can migrate knowing that many of them had a hand in shaping the new features.

Q. A current CRM application issue is feature overload. Some companies simply do not want to buy complicated enterprise applications. How has this impacted Teradata CRM 5.1?
A. We see tons of CRM functionality out there. In fact, there's so much functionality in Teradata CRM that no single customer is using all of it. That's not necessarily good or bad; it just means each company is evolving at a different pace. Yet we've done a really good job of getting ahead of the curve, because our development is driven by some of the leading companies on earth in terms of customer relationship management-firms that are solely focused on improving the quality of the customer experience as a competitive advantage.

We collaborate with these companies and develop new functionality and new features for them. But at the same time, all of our customers benefit from the process.

Ever since our first CRM application design, we have been advanced in terms of functionality. Over time, we have been able to mature the product in terms of quality, administration and being able to run the system in an enterprise IT environment.

With Teradata CRM Version 5.1, you see a lot of incremental functionality, things that "advanced" users are asking for.We're building more features into the product, but at the same time, we're improving the robustness of the product, the installation processes and the administration processes to make it easier, cheaper and more effective to implement.

Q. What's the underlying value proposition for Teradata CRM 5.1? How is it unique in the marketplace?
A. Number one, it's fast. Even if you remove all of the data latency enhancements and IT cost reductions, you still get the performance benefit because the SQL functionality is just faster.

The other thing is scalability.We're seeing a lot of competing applications that are not fully optimized for the Teradata Database at a large enterprise level.What tends to happen is that the applications start running into scalability problems.

Since we developed this product solely for the Teradata platform, we don't have to take shortcuts to make it integrate with other databases.We can focus hard on exploiting the power of the Teradata Database, adding to it and building on it.

We've got some huge clients who have up to 70 million customers in the database, running hundreds of campaigns in an automated fashion. There's no other application in the market right now that can adequately support that kind of volume and complexity.

Q. You've emphasized the role of clients in shaping each successive version of Teradata CRM. Why is that important?
A. From the beginning, Teradata clients have played a significant role in the design and development of our customer management solutions. Today, we have a very interactive user community.We have user groups that meet regularly, and they share inside information with each other. They use that as a vehicle to share their many solutions to similar problems and discuss the kinds of things that they want to do in the future.

I think it's interesting that within the same user group meetings you'll find a mix of individuals and professional disciplines. You'll see that some are business users who are looking at business strategy and business implementation, plus you'll see technology specialists who are looking at better ways to manage and deploy the solutions through their enterprises. There are many conversations and dialogues going on at multiple levels, and that input enables us to provide value to these users.

Q. So at the end of the day, companies are focused on implementing CRM in ways that resolve distinct issues.
A. Yes. The CRM vision is forward-looking. It's a future state where the business wants to be, but when you look at companies actually implementing CRM, the vision runs smack into complex realities. You have politics, you have budget constraints, and you have different opinions on what should happen.

Where CRM fails or succeeds is really in linking the vision to how you would practically implement the solution and the business change inside. It comes down to simple questions like 'How do you define what a customer looks like?' 'How do you define customer value?' 'What's good practice and what's not?'

The most practical consideration of all is actually financial. A customer-centered vision puts customers at the center of the universe. On the other hand, I don't know of any company who's in business solely to serve customers. Most are in business to make money. You have to balance the cost with the return.

A CRM strategy is a balancing act between business optimization and customer experience optimization. Companies have to evaluate the delivery and cost of service, the internal processes and specific campaign performance, and they must be able to develop new campaigns more quickly. It's something that develops and matures over time.

Q. What's the bottom line here? What are you taking to market?
A. It's the proven strength of Teradata CRM on the Teradata Database and the fact that we deploy solutions that can scale. You can start with a specific business issue and business scope, build a solution to resolve that, and then grow your capabilities as you encounter new problems over time. You can add data, departments and users, and you can integrate field people with corporate people. Ultimately, you integrate the enterprise through a single view of the customer.

The bottom line with Teradata CRM 5.1 is that it really delivers features and functionality that make life easier and more productive for IT as well as business users. We believe in bringing together smart IT teams and innovative marketers around CRM to collaborate in their competitive marketplaces. It's an approach that wins every time it's tried. T

Michael O'Sullivan, director of strategic communications for Teradata CRM, has written on subjects that span the business of both NCR and Teradata since 1993. He can be reached via e-mail at mike.osullivan@teradata-ncr.com.

Sam Gragg can be reached at sam.gragg@teradata-ncr.com.

© Teradata Magazine-September 2004