Companies have long strived for the latest, best ways to connect with their customers. Over the years, many tools have emerged to help businesses manage these customer communications.

But yesterday's tools could never anticipate the current state of client-customer interaction, including the emergence of communication channels that just a few years ago would have seemed more science fiction than fact. From coupons that reside on cell phones to gas pumps that invite a customer inside the store for a favorite afternoon snack, the face of customer communication is continuously changing.

Likewise, the face of effective customer relationship management (CRM) is continuously changing. Beyond leveraging new communication channels, companies must also craft messages in unique ways to ensure they can penetrate the barrage of competitors' messages to reach—and resonate with—their intended recipients. And, as if staying on top of constantly shifting communication best practices was not challenging enough, marketing executives are under incessant pressure to demonstrate departmental effectiveness while boosting company productivity and profitability.

Moving ahead with the future
Corporate executives are realizing that a CRM system that cannot keep pace with the new market realities can create catastrophic consequences for their businesses' bottom lines. To ensure your company's current system measures up, industry analysts suggest taking an inventory of these critical elements:

	Technology. Does your system architecture enable state-of-the-art enterprise marketing management and offer extensive capabilities in the areas of marketing resource management, e-marketing and real-time inbound communication? While cutting-edge technology is only a piece of the smarter marketing equation, it is an indispensable one that provides a flexible infrastructure to future-proof your business.
	Communication channels. Can your system support an unlimited number of traditional communication channels as well as innovative channels such as cell phones, ATMs, point-of-sale systems and even fuel pumps? With new channels constantly emerging, it is important to have a system that is adaptable and can help you leverage every channel for optimal use.
	Message targeting capabilities. Countless campaigns have succeeded (or failed) because of their audience targeting effectiveness. Make sure your system offers accurate, easy-to-use targeting tools that can be quickly mastered by and shared among business users and IT professionals. And remember that these tools must be both flexible and adaptable, because the world can change quickly.
	Reuse and collaboration capabilities. The reusability of designs, data, code and marketing elements is an increasingly important criterion for ensuring that organizations run at optimal productivity, are efficient and maintain a high level of consistency. Finding a system that allows you to leverage best practices across the enterprise, standardize processes and automatically enforce business rules is paramount to achieving long-term success.

Meeting the challenges
As the CRM landscape changes and evolves, communications that once seemed far-fetched are increasingly becoming the norm: Checkout clerks can now scan cell phones carrying bar-coded coupons; ATMs can display offers that are instantly customized to a customer's current situation; airlines or tour operators can create an instant marketing campaign to fill empty seats and modify the offer up to departure time.

Virtually no industry is immune to the growing challenge of delivering effective, customized, timely and relevant communications for its customer base across an ever-growing number of innovative channels. But with the right CRM system and knowledgeable, experienced industry consultants supporting it, your business will successfully meet those challenges today and into the future. T

Teradata Relationship Manager Version 6.0 enables smarter marketing New technologies, rapidly expanding information channels and the ever-growing complexities of customer communication have triggered a sea change in customer relationship management (CRM). Teradata Relationship Manager Version 6.0 offers the tools and resources to help companies rise above the competition. As outlined in the figure, Teradata Relationship Manager designers coupled the latest technology with the best practices of innovative, international user companies to create a solution that enables organizations to maintain a smarter, faster, customized marketing dialogue with every customer and across the enterprise. Its groundbreaking features include: > Multiple selection and segmentation methods. Tools provide five easy ways for employees across the enterprise to quickly access the Teradata system, locate specific data and select the right customers for exactly the right communications. > State-of-the-art collaboration tools. Users can quickly find, use and modify items created by others so better campaigns can be built and executed in less time with fewer resources. Also, automated business rules ensure regulatory adherence and process standardization. enlarge Now with Teradata Relationship Manager as its foundation, the comprehensive portfolio of hardware, software, implementation and consulting services from Teradata has been designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire marketing process. > Web-based architecture, browser-based graphical user interface. The Web-based platform ensures users optimal access and maintainability, while the browser-based interface is familiar to even new users. > Multi-step dialogue capabilities. Every comment, inquiry or action made by a customer can automatically trigger a planned communication response tailored to the individual, continuing the dialogue over the life of the customer relationship. > Real-time, inbound communication engine. When a customer contacts the company by phone, Web site, ATM or other channel, the Teradata system is automatically accessed to determine the next best message to deliver to the customer by a selected channel in real time. > Comprehensive marketing resource management. Companies can easily create, manage and monitor plans for the entire marketing organization. These tools, which include workflow tools, manage digital assets across the enterprise, provide task management functions and help improve productivity, lower costs and give additional visibility into marketing budgets. > Message optimization. Optimization tools help companies stage and prioritize their marketing messages to ensure customers are not bombarded with unwanted communications. Teradata Relationship Manager Version 6.0 blends best-of-breed functionality with the latest technology and a clear understanding of the evolution of CRM to create a system that can help companies communicate with customers in smarter, more innovative ways, across both traditional and emerging channels. —S.G.

Teradata Magazine-March 2008