NEW YORK, March 17, 2010 - In 2009, many CRM projects were deferred or cancelled due to the difficult and uncertain economy, but this trend is being reversed in 2010. While at the same time, the willingness to take on risk is low, there is little room for failure in organizations that are already stressed. Forrester Research, Inc. notes, “Battered by two years of recession, buyers of customer management solutions have become extremely value conscious. With vendors like Oracle and SAP touting new releases of their CRM products, enterprises running older versions of CRM apps are mulling whether to take the upgrade plunge. In a continuing weak economy, business process professionals are wondering if the benefits of upgrading their CRM solution will outweigh the costs.”1 Knoa, the market leader in End-User Experience Management software, today announced capabilities that will support both sides of the CRM value coin, for companies who are planning to upgrade their CRM applications or looking to drive more return from current investments.
Knoa Experience and Performance Manager (EPM) provides total monitoring coverage of end-user behavior and experience across enterprise applications, like CRM. Knoa EPM monitors application execution at the end-user level, and provides precise metrics about the end-user experience as well as measurements on how effectively people execute when working with enterprise applications. Knoa EPM also captures metrics on end-user error rates, utilization and compliance as well as user behavior and the workflow that the user experienced before, during and after transaction execution. A hallmark of Knoa’s end-user monitoring solutions is the unique ability to monitor 100% of application transactions executed by 100% of the end-user population with a low cost-of-ownership model. In a recent research report, Forrester Research surveyed business and IT professionals to pinpoint the real-world pitfalls that can trip up CRM initiatives. “Thirty-three percent of the problems reported were related to technology, 27% to business processes, 22% to people, and 18% to CRM strategy and deployment.”2 Knoa’s end-user management solutions help optimize the technology execution and minimize end-user challenges that account for nearly half of the reported challenges with CRM deployments.
Lower cost, improve success rates and shorten hyper-care of CRM upgrades
For companies looking to upgrade their existing CRM systems, Knoa is announcing full monitoring coverage for SAP CRM 7.0 and SAP CRM 2007. Knoa also currently offers ‘out-of-box’ monitoring of other market-leading CRM solutions including previous versions of SAP CRM solutions, Oracle Siebel CRM, Oracle E-Business CRM, Oracle Peoplesoft CRM, BMC Remedy, Amdocs and others.
Knoa is also announcing a new End-User Upgrade Planning Service, delivered in conjunction with a deployment of Knoa EPM, which will help companies lower the cost of upgrading, improve upgrade success and shorten the overall upgrade project cycle by enabling the following:
Ensuring end-user experience with SaaS CRM
According to multiple research reports and industry experts, SaaS adoption continues to be on the rise and many of the enterprises engaged with or deploying SaaS are focused on CRM. For those looking to migrate to SaaS, Knoa offers Knoa Virtual/Cloud Experience Manager (VCEM), the first truly off-the-shelf product designed to monitor and manage real end-user experience for enterprise applications that are running in virtualized environments, delivered via SaaS, or provisioned via Cloud Computing.
Extending the useful life of current investments
Gartner recently noted, “Fewer than 5% of CRM projects in 2009 were transformational and cross-departmental, involving deploying a broad variety of functions in a CRM suite.”3 Because of this many organizations are looking for ways to demonstrate the business value these technologies offer rather than investing more resources toward a siloed, ineffective approach.
Knoa EPM helps IT and the business perform better together by providing functionality which correlates IT transactions with business tasks and processes. Knoa EPM presents an analysis of system performance in business contexts, such as “create new account,” or “search opportunities.” EPM also delivers the ability to associate application components with end-to-end business processes (such as Opportunity-to-Cash) so that all Knoa performance metrics can be reported within the context of the relevant business process. In addition to providing a meaningful business context for identifying and analyzing user and application performance, this greatly increases transparency into IT operations for business stakeholders.
“CRM systems are one of the most challenging of all enterprise software deployments because so much of the end-user behavior necessary to drive results is essentially voluntary. All too often, adoption and effective use of CRM functionality is hampered by a below par end-user experience,” said Lori Wizdo, vice president, Marketing, Knoa Software. “Knoa’s end-user experience monitoring gives the IT organization access to real-time metrics to proactively address response time issues while end-user support professionals have immediate visibility into actual user workflow when problems happen. Further, the training organization can pinpoint specific application users that require additional training while process engineering can spot cumbersome workflows and errors that are affecting end-user satisfaction. Finally, the business stakeholders can determine usage concerns, such as who is using which transactions, how long are they active and how long are they idle. All-in-all, Knoa truly offers a 360 degree view of any enterprise’s CRM usage.”
For more information about Knoa’s solutions for CRM, go to http://www.knoa.com/main/solutions-CRM.jsp.
About Knoa
Knoa® Software is leading the performance management industry
with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor,
measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software applications to optimize business process execution.
Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise
applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively
and efficiently – the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected as a Gartner “Cool Vendor,”
for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the “Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End-user Experience Monitoring.”
Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit
www.knoa.com.
1 “Trends 2010: Customer Relationship Management,” Forrester Research, Inc. February, 2009
2 “How To Risk-Proof Your CRM Deployment Strategy,” Forrester Research, Inc. February 27, 2009
3 “The Elusive CRM Magic Quadrant,” Gartner, Inc., E. Thompson, T. Skybakmoen, December 22, 2009
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Editorial Contacts:
Mike Sullivan
PAN Communications
978.474.1900
knoa@pancomm.com
Note: Knoa is a registered trademark. All other company and product names contained herein are the marks of their respective holders.
