There is no denying the increasing business trend to harness the power of the Internet to not only get their message out, but to manage their customer responses.
For millions of companies the Internet provides a medium to service their customer interests, and facilitate greater communication.
However, managing, tracking and reporting on this information was, until recently, accomplished by either enormously expensive custom solutions such as Siebel, SAP or Oracle, or by using out of the box software that offered limited capabilities, required heavy customization, integration and constant maintenance.
This left many small to medium sized business in the dark, working off of spreadsheets and paper trails combined with the power of e-mail to manage their business processes. This expansive market needed a solution that could work from multiple locations, share information in real time, integrate with current systems and websites, yet still remain cost effective in today’s demanding business market.
The solution, Software as a Service (SaaS), a platform from which a business can manage its customers and relationships in a centralized online location, share information in a real time environment, and access it from anywhere in the world.
The SaaS model caters to the small to medium sized business looking for maintenance free solution that is easy to use, customizable, continually upgraded, backed by a service level guarantee, and most importantly affordable.
In hindsight, the out of box, in house supported network systems of years past appear to be rendered powerless against the strength of a single hosted solution shared be everyone within the organization over the Internet.
The Software as a Service model has propelled on demand Customer Relationship Management software to the forefront of software innovation. Given the power and flexibility that SaaS offers, from customization to integration, the increasing rate of migration to the on demand platform is no surprise.
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Collin Duffy enjoys writing about CRM subjects and on demand CRM software vendors such as Salesboom (http://www.salesboom.com )
