What should be the roadmap to enable my CRM on the cloud?
This is an oft posed question by most of the clients with a Siebel on premise
implementation. Every business wants to put across a cloud roadmap since that
is the future. But is it really time to do away with Siebel? What happens to
the time, money and effort that has gone into making the Siebel CRM a robust
and feature rich solution as required by the business? Is it easy to lift and
shift all of that to the cloud? Can't we better leverage our investments in
Siebel instead?
Let us look at how an Open UI based implementation can
transform the traditional Siebel user experience to a sustainable model which
can continue earning revenue for business.
Traditional Siebel Implementation
Siebel is a rich and comprehensive CRM which can serve as a one
stop solution for multiple business problems. It has provision for having 360
degree customer view as well as strong solutions in GTM, T2R and L2C
area. Siebel has out of the box campaign management solutions for go to
market strategy, service request, complaints and activity management for
trouble to resolve and a very strong order management journey supporting
complex product and pricing model for order to cash. Siebel also provides and
supports integration with multiple components of billing, provisioning etc to
have the end to end solution for a business use case achieved in a single
application.
Now Siebel did have some limitation in the earlier version
of being, not so intuitive and restricted to internet explorer as a browser.
Such limitations were not viable for mid-size business where
they looked for more nimble footed product where the cloud products score. They
are light weight applications with lesser maintenance, quick roll out
capability and offers specific services as per need.
For clients with large Siebel implementation, any sort of
cloud migration is easier said than done. Instead, they can look at the
latest Siebel Open UI roll outs and the roadmap proposed and see if they are
being used correctly and effectively by the business.
Most of the clients with Siebel on premise implementation
has either migrated to Siebel Open UI or has plans to do so, not just because
of the features and roadmap of Oracle but more so because of the roadblock posed
with high interactivity client in terms of future support. Once the upgrade to
Open UI happens, it definitely offers some of the out of the box capability
seamlessly. Browser and device independence, responsive web design, look and
feel and theme that has changed definitely add value to the client. But if we
really need to utilize Siebel Open UI and build solution to add revenue to
business, what comes OOTB is only a small percentage of what it can actually offer.
By adding a new user interface layer in Open UI architecture,
Oracle has opened up a plethora of opportunities with which one can redesign or
remodel the business use case and save millions with the new approach. Aided
with css, html, jquery and javascript technology, Oracle has opened up the web
world for Siebel users. Not only can we build innovative solutions with this
new layer but also utilize the number of widgets and code base available as
open source in the web world.
Implementation using Siebel Open UI
Traditional approach of understanding business requirement
and implementing the solution in Siebel will not produce the required results
when we use the same approach for Siebel Open UI based solution. A renewed
approach need to be used for implementing solutions based on Siebel Open UI.
Understanding Key Business Use Case
Understanding the pain points experienced by the user is very critical in
designing an Open UI based solution. It's very easy to get carried away to
beautify and remodel the entire application rather than looking at specific use
cases. Some of the questions which can be raised to check the relevance of the
use case is as below.
·
Is this used by majority of the users?
·
Is there a good revenue flow using this use
case?
·
Is the average handling time high?
·
Is the customer NPS low?
If the answer to all these are 'Yes' then the use case is
definitely one worth redesigning based on Open UI.
Gather Information
Once the use case is identified, the next step would be to
gather as much information of the use case as possible. Here I'm not talking
about the traditional requirement gathering part. But rather understand from
the actual users on how the application is being used.
·
Where are users taking most time while talking
to customer?
·
Are users having all the right information
presented intuitively?
·
Is the user confused on where and what
information to capture?
·
Are there a lot of unwanted clicks involved?
Once these information is gathered we can proceed to
evaluating options to re-implement using Siebel Open UI.
Evaluate possibilities
With the information gathered and with the knowledge of what
Open UI can deliver, relook and evaluate various implementation possibilities.
Wireframe, compare and evaluate the various possibilities by
listing down pros and cons. Check if there are additional information,
validations or integration touch points to be introduced to enhance the use
case. Use Siebel Open UI based approach to design a user intuitive use case
which brings and captures relevant information at the right time to the user so
as to reduce the agent handling time and improve customer experience.
Build Solution
Open UI can do away with the traditional screens and views
and bring in a total web based flavor of the use case. Some of the aspects
which can be looked at while building the solution are as below.
·
Build an uncluttered UI which presents relevant
information at the right time.
·
Highlight important information as required.
·
Show progress bar which displays the various
stages of use case being built.
·
Categorize the use case into stages and put each
stage in collapsible accordions which opens or displays information
progressively as relevant.
·
Keep user informed with progress bar showing
appropriate information when background processing is underway.
·
Use intuitive UI elements which makes capturing
information easier. For eg. Text area which shows remaining characters left or
revenue that can be captured by dragging a slider rather than typing in
information or using a type ahead capability.
·
Build a validation framework which minimizes
clicks and deals with correct information capture.
·
Keep users informed on what information is to be
captured for each field or stage using various methods like iHelp or text on
hover.
These are just few thoughts on how each use case can be
relooked at. As I mentioned before Open UI has unlocked the door of a secret
garden wherein innumerous widgets and code base is available in the internet
for user consumption.
Conclusion
So essentially by re-implementing some of the use cases in
Siebel using Open UI we can continue improving business much more than it was
possible using the traditional Siebel. Moreover the road map of Siebel Open UI
presents very interesting features ahead. Some of the interesting features to
look forward to are
·
Siebel Composer which is leading to a non srf
based implementation with zero down time for deployment.
·
Rest API based integration which allows Siebel
services to be exposed and consumed very easily.
·
Usage Pattern Tracking -- captures
end-users patterns of usage of applets and functions.
·
Genesys Chat Integration -- introduces an
end-to-end chat solution made available with Gplus adapter integration with
Genesys
In addition to that there are easy integration options
available with most of the cloud products, in case certain use case needs to be
implemented in Cloud to leverage cloud specific features.
So is there a burning need to do cloud migration for clients
with large Siebel implementation? Well the article can speak for itself.