Deploying Software as a Service solutions (otherwise known as "SaaS") delivers significant benefits to most enterprises with one exception: the ability to integrate processes and required enterprise data across the firewall securely. The main issue for SaaS-based customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, in particular, is that data from across the enterprise is needed to effectively respond to and anticipate customer needs. In other words, business people need a complete picture of their customers (including their billing history, product portfolio and support inquiries).

Companies have traditionally implemented a work-around: they physically imported/moved the data from their enterprise systems and loaded it into their SaaS provider's database. The obvious drawbacks were many: the data had to be refreshed regularly via batch loads and synchronization, current data was never available in real time, storage costs were high, resources had to be allocated to managing data loads and to write the scripts (or an expensive ETL tool was used), and the whole process took a great deal of time and money. Additionally, some companies cannot move data beyond their firewalls due to compliance and regulation issues with securing data. If it moves outside the organization, it is not considered secure.

Not dealing with this problem effectively, results in:

• High cost to deliver services
• Lost revenue opportunities
• Lost customers
• Lower customer service satisfaction

Furthermore, without a real time infrastructure in place bridging the gap between the enterprise and the SaaS solution, it is near impossible to integrate logic-based business rules and workflow automation. Without these pertinent components to managing large and complex data sets and multiple business units, customer interfacing employees cannot easily identify: sales opportunities (such as cross-sell/up-sell); sales leads (potential customers); risks (account closure, customer churn); potential support issues (high number of open tickets); and they cannot communicate efficiently and productively across the enterprise with other parties regarding specific accounts. The end results are inefficiency, loss of revenue potential, and poor customer centricity.

The goal: STOP IMPORTING data in to CRM systems. There's a better way...

Read on to find out how we address this real problem.

A study by Kaset International found:

• 96% of unhappy customers never complain
• 91% will not buy again or use your service
• An unhappy customer will tell nine others about their bad experience
• 13% of unhappy customers will tell 20 or more people