Remember back in the day, when the hottest thing to do online was to get yourself a Geocities page and trick it out with animation and counters and luridly technicolor fonts? We’ve sure come a long way in the years since then. The Internet is no longer a toy—or at least not exclusively. It’s also a crucial business tool that has grown so sophisticated it is now possible to run entire businesses completely online.
This networking capability has become known as cloud computing. The cloud is so named because the diagrams of computer networks often remind casual onlookers of clouds floating in the sky. Whether you call it the cloud, the Internet, the Web or “teh interwebs,” it’s revolutionized the way that companies conduct business and interact with customers.
There are several success stories of major companies like Dell, Dolby, Google, and other large companies that have dramatically increased their revenue streams through customer relationship management. Consumer relationship management, or CRM, is a shorthand term for all of a company’s interactions with its customer base. With cloud computing, CRM changed from handling offline customer data processing and sales lead tracking, to customizing online buying platforms that supported an individual customer’s preferences.
Practical Application
Global Futures & Forex, a worldwide foreign exchange provider, needed to centralize their system to help run their business more efficiently. In addition, company data needed to be accessible from a single location worldwide, and the company wanted to disseminate key information to customers via web portals.
Through cloud computing, the company was able to streamline its entire information database by using a single Web site as a worldwide reference point. This allowed them to diversify their services by centralizing the input and output of critical information. In addition, the cloud enabled them to fully customize their interfaces, which made them more user-friendly. The cloud also allows Global Futures & Forex to develop new trading platforms and deploy them in half the time without outsourcing, saving them both time and money. Now they provide several different services to their clients, all through the cloud.
Cloud computing not only makes social networking possible, but also makes it a viable marketing tool through customer relationship management. A good CRM app will help aggregate the information received from social networks and integrate it into the marketing approach, customer service response, sales initiatives and other aspects of doing business. As some companies are finding out the hard way, ignoring the growing communities of “followers” and “fans” is a surefire way to get left behind. CRM tools can help you make the most of these popular platforms.
Yet perhaps the most important—and game-changing—aspect of cloud-based apps is the fact that they can be accessed from anywhere, using any device that has an Internet connection. Use your iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry or other smartphone, or your laptop or Netbook. There’s no longer any need to sit chained to a desk inside an office. Cloud-based apps allow employees to much freer and more flexible than traditional server-based models. This benefits salespeople who travel, help desk employees who can be located globally, and employees who want to telecommute. Since the cloud is everywhere, you can do business anywhere—except maybe in Geocities. But then, who wants to go back there, anyway?
