RealMarket - From the Top Executive Interview

	From the Top
From the Top *- Executive to Executive -* Want to know what’s on the mind of the number one CRM person at PeopleSoft? RealMarket caught up with PeopleSoft Senior Vice President and CRM General Manager, Stan Swete for an exclusive “From the Top” discussion. Get a candid insight into what PeopleSoft is doing in CRM and what you can expect in the future. Stan Swete, Senior Vice President and CRM General Manager, PeopleSoft RealMarket: PeopleSoft has recently thrown its weight behind the vision of the real time enterprise. What is your ‘elevator pitch’ for the real time enterprise? Swete: It’s about taking CRM to the enterprise. Most companies have now had success with some form of CRM and are now ready to build on that success. The challenge is to take it up a level and integrate CRM as a strategy across the enterprise. That means focusing on rich applications for automating sales, support and marketing but also adding in the functionality in the products that let’s them integrate into the rest of the business picture. Enterprises are starting to realize that success is really tied to giving the customer complete experiences at all touch points - not just good CRM in the call center and then take your chances everywhere else. That involves processes that tie in a complete picture of all your products and all your touch points so that anyone that engages the customer is informed as possible about what that customer is doing so you don’t have a satisfied customer in the call center but a totally disgruntled customer when it comes to shipping, billing or some other part of the enterprise. RealMarket: Last year the PeopleSoft talked about the collaborative enterprise. Now it is the real time enterprise. How did you get from point A to point B - is this a revolution or an evolution? Swete: The real time enterprise is a more specific description of how to achieve collaboration between customers, employees and suppliers. There is a huge role for CRM solutions in creating huge business pay-offs to operate your business in real time by connecting business processes. Real time is more related to business value. This is how people achieve the level of collaboration we’ve been talking about. Along the way in the supply chain we saw that we weren’t just a vendor of HR applications, then financials applications and then CRM but a provider of solutions that cut across the enterprise. Of course, there is a big role for CRM to tie customers into the enterprise. Real time is the business payoff for putting your business processes on the Internet and across the enterprise. That is a concept that is related to business value. RealMarket: Do you believe the reports that CRM failure rates exceed 50% as the reports over the last year indicate? Swete: The reports tend to confirm that CRM is ready for new challenges. I don’t know if anyone knows the hard and exact number and perhaps no one can really tie that back to specific root causes. I see general trends. Rapid CRM growth and success has led sales and support processes to be automated. It has lead to granting company information directly to customers over the phone, over the web - virtually anyway the customer wants to communicate. Because of that, customers now have higher expectations. Enterprises are measuring themselves to higher standards - that leads to the failures documented in the reports. RealMarket: What’s the biggest change on the CRM horizon. Swete: US, absolutely! Seriously, if you look at trends, it’s almost eerie how the CRM industry is maturing similar to ERP. Ten years ago you might have found companies shopping separate financial management applications from different vendors. It sounds ridiculous today for financials and it will increasingly become the game in CRM. It’s the only way to officially optimize the customer experience across the enterprise. That’s the way markets grow up. Then, and only then, CRM will really look like an enterprise solution. RealMarket: How big is the PeopleSoft CRM customer base? Swete: We have 850-900 customers that have implemented the acquired Vantive solution set. We introduced PeopleSoft 8 CRM ten months ago and we’ve attracted somewhere between 100 - 200 net new customers so we would quote over a thousand CRM customers. RealMarket: OK, among PeopleSoft successes, what is the common thread of success? Swete: Companies that do a real balancing act of thinking broadly but staying focused on success tend to see the most benefits. Companies can’t just blow everything up and succeed. They need to think in terms of next steps. For examples, “I want to eliminate gaps in how customers deal with us so there is not a let-down in customer service.” ABN-AMRO is an example of a company that has had to integrate broadly across the enterprise. HP is another example using our Vantive product. These are customers thinking broadly across the enterprise but thinking step-wise. RealMarket: When you are talking with a prospective customer, do you find product functionality or integration as the driving decision maker? Swete: Both parts of that discussion are important to PeopleSoft. The decision is one that kicks off a partnership that will last for many, many years. There is a high level discussion at the enterprise that says there must be an agreed upon course that will focus on how solutions will work together. At the same time, we believe the product functionality must be best-in-class. That being said, we are not going for the most features - we are striving for the most important features. RealMarket: PeopleSoft has a very broad offering across the supply chain, managing customers, human capital and financials. However, many times customers will ask you to integrate to non-PeopleSoft solutions. What are the most popular requests you receive? Swete: The most popular is integration with legacy systems. The enterprises we deal with have many systems they wrote or bought a while ago. As far as other vendors, we certainly see projects to integrate to our competitors like SAP and Oracle. We see projects to integrate to our partners, like the revenue management capability we built with SPL. While we don’t get requests today, I guess you might see a Siebel connection in the future. RealMarket: The CRM market has a market share leader but the industry overall has lacked leadership. How would you like to see CRM leadership? Swete: We are in an industry with a clear leader and an industry desperately looking for a challenger. In our industry, there are all sorts of ways to lead. Market share is important and highly desirable but leading in terms of vision and execution to drive new functionality and technology that is relevant to the business is a form of leadership. We want to capitalize on our experience with enterprise business processes to become a market leader. That will put pressure on the current market leader to react to define their relevance. We don’t want to be a supply chain vendor selling CRM. We want to be an enterprise partner. Years ago, we saw what our customers wanted across the enterprise and we changed. Others will have to demonstrate they can change as well. top of page