September 11, 2015
Customer Service in Your Selection of Software VendorsI was reading Naomi Bloom’s blog post, “In Enterprise Software and Luxury Accommodations, Details Matter and No Disappointment Accepted” and it got me thinking. While Naomi is referencing HR software, her points apply to all Enterprise Software and she makes a really good comparison, yet I will add another element, Customer Service. Things will happen, whether at the luxury accommodations or with your Enterprise Software. The key question becomes what does the establishment/vendor do when there is a problem? That will probably be what you remember more than the actual problem.Addressing Enterprise SoftwareIt is inevitable that there will be problems during implementation. Any software vendor who tells you they never have problems is lying to you. Expectation differences, communication gaps, the customer environment is slightly (or vastly) different than the vendor was told/expected…
June 28, 2016
A Great CRM PlatformThis blog entry is for all the stakeholders who rely on or must support Amdocs Clarify systems. If you are like most, you have probably spent years searching for a better way forward than the one Amdocs offers. Years...because it's a tough application to replace.In its day, as we all know, Clarify was a great CRM platform for a variety of business types because it was so versatile. But the technology is old and with every year that passes, it becomes harder to find people with the skills needed to keep it in good shape. This unfortunate situation usually leads to an insidious decline in utility and reliability until a breaking point is reached; a tiger team checks out options which yields nothing palatable; more struggles, higher overhead, worsened utility until another breaking point is reached (even…
August 11, 2015
On-Prem to SaaS Over the last 15 years or so as legacy Amdocs/Clarify deployments gradually began to be replaced by other on premise CRM providers such as SAP and Siebel (two we used to see often), companies somewhat knew what they were getting into. They had experience implementing a fairly similar CRM at least once by that point. They knew it was going to be a relatively timely, resource intensive and costly upfront expense to rip and replace. However, as SaaS and various other hosted CRM offerings came along, the enticement of a less costly upfront expenditure, combined with more out-of-the-box configurability from the user and admin standpoint showed promised. Whether it’s an on premise or SaaS solution being considered for rip-and-replace to legacy Clarify deployment, they both have serious challenges that require extremely careful forethought to help ensure success…